A relação entre a implantação da manufatura enxuta nas PMEs industriais e o seu desempenho econômico-financeiro

Abstract

The manufacturing sector has been facing in the last decades deep structural changes. Up to mid-eighties the mass production was the standard used by the Western industrial companies. However, with the knowledge by westerns of the Lean Manufacturing system, the manufacturing firms began changing their production system to the new paradigm, obtaining as a result significant gains in quality, productivity, flexibility, producing with lower costs and delivery times. For the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) it has not been different because, like the big companies, they have been progressively adopting the Lean principles, however with no assurance of obtaining financial gains resulting from that action. Hence, the main purpose of this work was to identify if the lean manufacturing practices adopted by the Brazilian industrial SMEs contribute to the improvement of their financial performance. To accomplish that, a thorough literature review was performed aiming at identifying how this subject has been considered in the recent Industrial Engineering and Operations Management writings. This enabled the proposition of four hypotheses that were validated through multiple case studies, comprising three small and three medium sized Brazilian industrial companies. The results obtained showed that it was not possible to find a relationship between the level of Lean practices adoption and the size (billing) of said firms. Furthermore, amongst the variables that measure the financial performance, only the net profit and return on sales (ROS) showed a positive correlation with the degree of adoption of the Lean initiatives, indicating that, for the selected companies, the higher the implementation level of the Lean Manufacturing, the higher their profit or profitability.