Critical Factors on Lean Implementation to the Portuguese Aeronautic Industry

Abstract

The Portuguese public sector organizations are increasingly concerned about cost reduction, not only because of the constant budget reductions due not only to the economic crises settled in the country but also to the pandemic scenario whose consequences are still unknown and unpredictable. In addition, an increasing concern is a circularity that contributes to a more sustainable world through focus on resource cycles approaches. In this context was conducted a systematic review and skimming of papers for relevance based on Lean techniques applied to the Portuguese aeronautic industry, using the Online Knowledge Library (b-on) and national university’s repositories. Aiming to identify Lean critical factors resulting from Lean techniques implementation in the sector, the results of the literature review determined as main difficulties founded during all the process, include the existence of several hierarchical dependencies, being a pioneer in their implementation, the lack of motivation of the workers, the lack of training, misalignment of goals and resistance to change, resulting in loss of function control, operational instability and setbacks. Nonetheless, Lean implementation also revealed important advantages, such as human resources reduction, resource optimization, elimination of task duplication, process simplification, and warehouse space optimization. Although the present study has a theoretical approach, all critical factors presented were tested on empirical-based studies proving evidence about their validity.

Manuela Maria de Oliveira, Carlos Rouco and Paula Gonçalves—Contributing authors.