Most Brazilian plants have already had a lean programme. Usually a wave of 5S, some boards, a certificate on the wall — and eighteen months later the floor looks exactly as it did before.
Request Free Diagnostic →When we walk a plant that has "already done lean", the evidence is usually still there: faded floor tape, a kanban rack used for storage, a kaizen board with cards from two years ago. The tools were installed. The reason they were installed was never made clear to the people expected to sustain them.
Lean fails to stick for a specific and predictable reason. It gets run as a training programme rather than as a change to how work is done and supervised. Once the workshops end and the external facilitator leaves, nothing in the daily routine requires the new behaviour, so the old one returns. It is not resistance. It is the absence of a mechanism.
We sequence the work differently. Stability and standard work first, then flow, then pull. A kanban system installed on top of an unstable process simply makes the instability visible faster while everyone blames the kanban.
Current state built from observed data, not from the routing file. We time the process ourselves. The gap between the routing and reality is usually the finding that matters most.
Separating internal from external setup, pre-staging tooling, standardizing the sequence. Usually the fastest path to real capacity in a high-mix plant, and it requires no capital.
Supermarkets and pull loops sized to actual demand variability and actual supplier lead times — which in Brazil are longer and less reliable than most textbook sizing assumes.
5S only holds when there is a scheduled audit with a named owner and a consequence for drift. Without that it is a cleaning campaign with a Japanese name.
Focused multi-day events on a defined problem, with a baseline measured before and verified after. Team-led, facilitated by us, and handed over.
Not a poster. A structured walk to quantify overproduction, waiting, transport, over-processing, inventory, motion and defects in your specific process.
We map the value stream, quantify the largest losses, and tell you which lean tools are actually appropriate for your situation — including which ones are not. Delivered at no cost.
Standard work and basic process stability come first. Applying flow tools to an unstable process is the single most common reason lean programmes fail.
We run the first kaizen events and coach your people through the second. Operators who helped build the standard defend it; operators who were trained on it do not.
Layered audits, standard work for supervisors, a review cadence. This is what makes the difference between improvement and a temporary result.
We measure the same way we measured at the start. If a gain cannot be demonstrated against the original baseline, we do not claim it.
Because we treat the sustaining mechanism as part of the deliverable rather than as an afterthought. In the diagnostic we specifically examine why the previous programme decayed — that history is usually the most useful information available.
No. Kaizen events are scheduled around production windows and most work happens on running lines. Some changeover trials need planned downtime, which we schedule with your team in advance.
That is the objective. We facilitate the first cycles, co-facilitate the next, and observe the ones after that. If your team cannot run an event without us, the engagement is not complete.
Often more so than for a large one. Small plants tend to have short decision chains, so change moves faster. The tool selection differs — changeover and standard work usually matter more than levelling.
We work in English with management and in Portuguese on the floor. Shop-floor documentation is always in Portuguese, because that is what determines whether it gets used.
Tell us about your operation in Brazil. We reply within one business day — no cost, no commitment.