Perceptions and Understandings on the Need of Change: Viewpoints across Management Levels - New Contributions in Information Systems and Technologies - page 230

Giving these values recently released by ATP, Portuguese TCI, mainly constituted
by Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), continues to be a very important sector and
still plays an important role in the Portuguese economy. However, it is seen as an
industry with cultural barriers, where many continue being small of familiar structure,
inhibiting them to gain a higher dimension and a critical mass. Additionally, it is also
portrayed as low productivity industry with poor management practices and human
resources with low educational level and without the adequate skills from the top-
level to the shop-floor collaborators [2]. This type of industry is, many times,
associated with wastes, shop-floor disorganization (Fig. 1) and not valuing people as
the main asset.
Fig. 1. Examples of wastes and disorganization in TCI
A good organization, waste elimination, good work environment promotion and
human potential valorization imply a culture change on the way people think and act.
To achieve this change, companies have been used Lean Production principles and
tools [3]. Lean Production (LP) is a work organizational model focused on the
customer and delivery on time quality products, materials and information without
any wastes, i.e., activities that add no value to the products from the customer point of
view, respecting people and environment. This means “doing more with less” where
less implies less space occupied, less transports, less inventories, and most important,
less human effort and less natural resources [4].
To achieve this key idea, Womack and Jones [5] defined Lean Thinking five
principles: 1) Value; 2) Value Stream; 3) Flow; 4) Pull System and 5) Pursue
Perfection. This last principle implies being always dissatisfied with the status quo
and in a continuous improvement ( kaizen ) eliminates all wastes from processes and
services in the organizations. People are the only with skills and capable of doing that
so they must be stimulated and their potential valorized. Untapped human potential is
considered a waste [6] in a Lean environment.
For a better and successfully implementation of LP in Portuguese TCI, the authors
proposed a methodology published elsewhere [7]. Succinctly, this methodology is
divided in three phases: 1) preparation of work environment and people; 2)
implementation of methodology and 3) evaluation, standardization and sustainability,
considering different dimensions: the ergonomic dimension, the sustainability
dimension, the operational dimension and the human capital dimension. The first
phase is to evaluate if the companies are prepared for change, what they intend to do
to perform change, and how they will react to change. If the company is not
compromised with Lean Production, and particularly, their top-level management,
almost certainly the change will fail.