Integration University-Industry: Laboratory Model for Learning Lean Manufacturing Concepts in the Academic and Industrial Environments.

In the current production scenario, with a globalized economic environment, companies increasingly need to become more competitive to face up to the global market. This means production systems are constantly changing in the direction of the replacement of the low productivity equipment, rearranging the plant layout, the redirection of the transport stream from the supplier to the end customer and adding new models to plan and control production. All these changes aim to improve product quality and to reduce production lead time by eliminating waste, reducing costs and increasing competitive advantage through the process flexibility. For these changes to happen effectively is necessary that the current employees and the future production engineers are inserted and fit in this new reality. Currently, the Lean Manufacturing concepts are applied in an industrial environment to optimize production flow eliminating the waste found in the process. However, there is a challenge to put these concepts effectively in the industrial environment and in the university environment. The traditional learning process based on teacher, classroom, non-integrated theoretical and practical concepts, case studies with static production characteristic (controlled variable) has been shown to be ineffective in the consolidation of these concepts in a dynamic production environment. In university, this same model applied in the production engineering course and fragmented into different disciplines makes production engineers not fully prepared for the challenges of the new industrial environment, requiring an adjustment period. This adaptation will result in low competitiveness of the company in front of global competitors. Thus, this article aims to present a laboratory model for integrated learning of the Lean Manufacturing concepts based in practices able to reproduce the dynamic production environment, thus speeding the process of training employees of the industrial environment and the learning of future production engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]