Proposta de metodologia para a melhoria contínua: o processo e a gestão.

Abstract

Organization s management has been sharply developed towards convergent policies, where some core principles are recognized as definitive in the many different managerial approaches, among them process s management, PDCA as method for management, human resources development and continuous improvement (CI). Organization s CI efforts have shown many expressive unsuccessful cases both of implementation and of long term sustaining and evolution. One possible explanation for it is the fact the organizations have not managed CI as a process. For this reason, we focused this work in the issue CI process and its management. Revision of the issue has led us to think that CI, when considered as a process, can be managed towards result s maintaining or improving having as basis the PDCA method for management. And that, among the many bundles of causes acting and producing effects on the CI process s results, the human resources bundle plays a main role by means of developing behaviors connected to CI on organization s people. Those behaviors shared by people and spread out in the organization begin to build up an organization s ability on CI. Inside the issue s revision, we had the perception that organizations can grow by developing stages, also called CI s maturity levels , by means of which organizations have an evolution towards CI capability, also understood as the organization s ability of gaining strategic advantage when expanding innovation to a significant part of organization. This work aims to propose CI management methodologies giving support to managers, expanding CI management context beyond the usage of tools and result s monitoring to include elements related to developing maturity to deal with CI. The proposed methodologies aim to demonstrate CI as a process and its management equal to any other process that can be deployed in managerial actions to maintain and to improve the current results. In managing for maintaining results the goal may be to reach the effectiveness in CI, and when managing for improving results the goal may be the organization s evolution towards CI capability. This work has been developed from the revision of bibliography and may be classified as theoretical research, using aspects of logic and science s philosophy to build up the arguments supporting its proposals. Key words: continuous improvement, production improvement, quality improvement.