Use of A3 Report by Industrial Engineering Students As a Tool to Analyze and Interpret a Case Study

Lean Thinking is a philosophy which principles were redesigned from Toyota Production System (TPS) by Womack and Jones of MIT. Currently, Lean Thinking principles are taught in the academy and are applied in all sectors, from production to services. Services is what is provided to students in a university. Teachers provide a service to them, and they are the clients of this service. As so, teachers want to provide the best service, adding value to the “client” product. In order to do so, they search for new methods that create flow in the way students learn what they need to learn. Lean Thinking have been providing tools to the classroom to obtain such flow. Standard work, PDCA among others are tools that have been applied to improve classes and added value to the students learning. This paper intends to present another tool, an A3 report, from TPS that was used to analyze, interpret and report a published case study. This was demanded by the teacher as a team assignment task that was assessed and counted to final grade of a course of third year of Master Integrated of Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM). There were some conditions imposed by the task assignment that teams should verify: 1) select a case study that should be about reconfiguration of production system (fixed layout/job shop/cells/lines) that is a content studied in the course; 2) the case study is a publication that should be downloaded from main databases like Scopus and ISI Web of Knowledge, being the papers selected indexed. The main idea using an A3 as a learning tool was fivefold: 1) students know and learn to use A3 report; 2) students learn to search in the databases; 3) students recognized indexed scientific papers from main databases; 4) students learn to interpret a published case study and to synthetize information in a different format; and 5) students learn some concepts of the course contents before their lecture. Results based on the presentations and discussion among teacher and students were very positive. The case study motivates students’ curiosity to learn the concepts, not yet explained in the classroom. At the same time, students’ teams learn to use A3 to present the case study results, forcing them to be synthetic and to select the important information from the case. Using A3 is also useful to create a “bridge” between the teaching and learning activities at universities and the development of continuous improvement in companies that, normally, also used this tool.