Analysis of the adoption of lean practices in Brazilian companies: an exploratory study

This article investigates the adoption of Lean Production in Brazilian companies based on the premises of the Lean Manufacturing Model.The work was developed considering the Lean Production construct by means of 65 (sixty-five) variables that characterize Lean grouped in 8 (eight) dimensions of analysis: costs, production control, continuous flow, setup, leveling and balancing of production, process autonomy, standardization of operations and people. The stage of adoption of lean in companies was identified from the survey with directors, managers, supervisors, engineers in charge and analysts. For the study, a structured questionnaire was used to collect data, not disguised as assertive, contemplating several aspects of the Lean model. The degree of agreement with the assertion was signaled using the scale resulting from a combination of the Stapel scale with the Likert scale with 10 (ten) points. The data obtained were analyzed using descriptive statistics.
This work was partially supported by projects COMPETE-POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT-UID-CEC-00319-2013, from Portugal.