Metodologia kaizen na melhoria de processo: estudo de Caso em uma linha de produção de cerveja

Abstract

With an annual production of more than 14 billion of liters, Brazil is the third biggest beer producer in the world. The state of Ceará is the home of 3 of over 800 breweries located in the country. One of those breweries owns a packaging line which operational efficiency was below the expected. A small group of people was designated to improve the efficiency in the most critical part of the production line. This stretch transports empty bottles from the exit of the bottle washer until the entrance of the bottle filler. The main problem in this stretch were fallen bottles, which caused crashes and, consequently, frequent interruptions in the production that also caused work overload in the operators. Using a problem solving approach developed in the company, which is based in the continuous improvement methods of the Japanese TPM, it was chosen to minimize this problem through a methodology called kaizen. This methodology is commonly used in industry to improve results and productivity. After a sequence of predefined steps, which included restore of basic conditions and the elimination of the root cause of the problem through a detailed analysis, an improvement of 1,9% in the efficiency and a reduction of 78% of the downtime of the line due to fallen bottles in this stretch were obtained. As a consequence of the downtime reduction, that needed operator's intervention to reestablish the production, a reduction of the work overload was also achieved.