AVALIAÇÃO DAS OPORTUNIDADES DE MELHORIAS NA LOGÍSTICA INTERNA: O CASO DE UMA EMPRESA DE METAIS SANITÁRIOS

To keep up with the global competitiveness, companies have been investing more each day in implementation of tools belonging to the philosophy of Lean Production (LP) throughout the production chain. The logistics sector has been one of the improvement focuses, as it features one of the largest costs related to manufacturing. The implementation of LP tools in internal logistics has proved an efficient alternative in reducing logistics costs and enhancing material flow. This work aims to identify and evaluate existing problems in the internal logistics flow in a company in order to elaborate an improvement proposal based on the Lean philosophy. This methodology consolidates information through additional methods for qualitative analysis to assess problems from different views, brought by each method. The application of the method will be illustrated in a company of hydraulic tools and decorative sanitary metals, which is currently implementing LP tools. Among the results, it were highlighted an improvement in the production flow, obtained by reducing the number of operators in the internal logistics and decreasing 85% of the errors related to the shipment of finished products