Perceptions and Understandings on the Need of Change: Viewpoints across Management Levels - New Contributions in Information Systems and Technologies - page 232

2.2 Interview Design

The interviews were conducted based on an interview guide. This interview guide
include the following topics:

(1) general description of the project (for contextualization purposes);

(2) interviewee social-demographic characteristics and the company

characterization;

(3) identification of the purposes of the company (more specific for the company

administration);

(4) characterization of the working population;

(5) awareness on the need for change and its causes;

(6) how the managers intend to participate on this change (strategies used);

(7) why the change and how to make this change;

(8) what are the expected outcomes/results; and

(9) suggestions.

The average individual interview length was, more or less, 30 minutes each. All
interviews, a total of eleven in both companies, were tape-recorded with the prior
approval of the interviewee and confidentiality kept at all times. Then, they were
transcribed and sent to the interviewees to validate them. After this, the interviews
contents were analyzed using the WebQDA [10].

2.3 Characterization of the Case Studies

Company A is a forty-five old company that had an outsized shop-floor space with an
annual production of 1 000 000 units and employed more than 500 employees. It is a
multi-national company with French origins and it exports all products that produce.
Such as others TCI companies, it suffered from a recent offshore to a low labor wages
country. Year after year had been increasing the lowest range products to produce
offshore, carrying the large machines to overseas. Nowadays, maintain the same
infrastructures most empty, occupying only a quarter of the space with production less
than 600 000 units annually and employing 162 employees. In the current infra-
structures, only produces the high range and more expensive products, keeping the
most complex processes indoors such as the remeshing process that demands a high
quality and where Portuguese operators has a unique knowledge of that.
Even with a reduced production, the larger infrastructure gives it a “heavy body”
that additionally to the long distance corridors needs more than ever, of a better
organization to agile the processes and reduces the wastes. So, the company maintains
a vast physical space and empty areas waiting for better days where the main
challenge will be to attract new clients/projects or captivate the top manager to
insourcing the production in Portugal as before. To do this it will need a different
mind-set and leanness to become an agile company. This need could be the motive for
the openness to change.
Company B is a twenty-five years old company that has, approximately, 4000 m 2
distributed by three attached industrial buildings. It is, solely, an export company with