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LeanOffice@DPS team received an Honorable Mention Back

Thursday, 11/10/2016   
Menção Honrosa LeanOffice@DPS
Carla Rocha and Amélia Aguiar represented the team at the 41st Colloquium of Quality, presenting the theme “Creation of a continuous improvement system in the context of lean office implementation”.
At the 41st Colloquium of Quality, organised by the Portuguese Association for Quality (APQ), the LeanOffice@DPS team was selected to present, in the session of improvement teams, the theme “Creation of a continuous improvement system in the context of lean office implementation”. The session was held at ISCTE, in Lisbon, from 10th to 11th November 2016, and team members Carla Rocha and Amélia Aguiar participated as speakers.

Lean office is a technique that aims to organise the workspaces and aims to help employees to optimise daily tasks: “In administrative procedures it is more difficult to measure errors, time, documents, so we intended to adopt this name to distinguish non-industrial lean from office lean, which is exactly the one we do”, Carla Rocha – one of the team’s spokespersons – clarifies.

The Department of Production and Systems (DPS) continuous improvement team received an Honorable Mention at the recognition session. The Improvement Teams Award was launched in 2007 and is assigned annually by APQ. The aim is to distinguish actions developed by Improvement Teams and to contribute to the dissemination, together with the community of quality professionals, of good practices for the continuous improvement of organisations.

“Humans do not like to make constant mistakes in their professional life. However, we have tried to prove that error is always an opportunity for improvement. This award came to strengthen our work as administrative staff”, Amélia Aguiar – another of the representatives of the team – defends.

Based on the Toyota Kata methodology, the team adapted these concepts to promote improvement and leadership practices in order to develop performance standards and behavioural routines for continuous improvement. “With this methodology, he have overcome many constraints. Now, we look for mistakes, but in the past we almost hid them, because we didn’t notice them”, Carla Rocha reveals.

The LeanOffice@DPS team has completed 13 projects so far in different areas of improvement, such as the implementation of 5S (sorting, cleaning, organisation, standardisation and discipline), the electronic standardisation, the process mapping and the implementation of a solution of mobile workstations.

The creation of the LeanOffice@DPS blog http://leanoffice.dps.uminho.pt/ is another project of this team. It is still under construction, but aims to be a tool capable of fostering the exchange of knowledge and experiences. The LeanOffice@DPS team was constituted in 2014 by the seven employees of the DPS of the EEUM, Acácio Costa, Alexandra Fernandes, Amélia Aguiar, Carla Rocha, Conceição Marques, Luís Coutinho and Rita Rodrigues, under the supervision of the professors Anabela Alves, Dinis Carvalho and Nélson Costa.

Menção Honrosa LeanOffice@DPS
Lean
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