Purpose – This paper aims to explore the lean production paradigm as promoter of workers' creativity and thinking potential, and recognize this human potential as a fundamental asset for companies' growth and success, being a major factor to face the disturbing and unpredictable needs of current markets, providing companies with the necessary agility. The authors believe these thinkers are the base for an agile company and learning organization. Design/methodology/approach – The objectives were achieved through a deep literature review, starting with the Toyota production system (TPS) origins. Some industrial lean case studies were also explored to show that the adoption of a lean culture promotes a pro-active attitude and behavior that are so important for companies nowadays. Findings – This paper explores the association between lean production and the promotion of thinkers. For a long period, and even nowadays, it is common to consider the worker as just another production factor that the companies explore to obtain the maximum utilization. This was a result from the distorted knowledge of the Taylor principles and the Ford assembly line model, seeing the worker as a gear in the “big machine”. Lean production was seen, for many years and by many authors, as an extension of this Taylorist/Fordist model but this paper highlights lean production as a work organization model where the worker assumes a position of thinker, continuously looking for improvement and continuously looking for wastes. By reducing wastes, the company will be prepared to accommodate changes and will attain agility. Research limitations/implications – This paper is mainly based on literature review and on some industrial case studies of lean implementations (recent or just a few years ago); a deep research is necessary on the cause-effect relation between lean production adoption and promotion of thinkers. Practical implications – Helping companies to recognize the importance of workers as thinkers will have relevant impacts through the reduction of waste and costs, improving quality and increase productivity and revenue. Also, for workers, this recognition means respect, self-esteem and confidence, and, essentially, more satisfaction with work. Social implications – With lean production and agility, better products will quickly reach society, contributing thus to clients' satisfaction. Also, lean companies' CEO and workers looking for wastes will lead to a reduction of energy consumption, raw materials needs and gas emissions (reducing pollution of air, land and water), producing only what is needed. Being satisfied with their work they will be happier contributing to the raising of the country's happiness. Originality/value – The authors are not aware of similar research. The paper is meant for those who are interested in improving their companies' operations and workers' relationships.

The global industrial landscape has deeply changed over the last few years and the Industry 4.0 concept has emerged, being enabled by successive disruptive innovations and technological development that have transformed manufacturing processes. This concept is being pointed out as the fourth industrial revolution that embraces a set of new technologies that are shaping the future manufacturing vision. However, Lean Production is a widely used manufacturing approach that brings several benefits to organizations. Despite the integration between Industry 4.0 and Lean Production is being researched in the recent years, the impacts that result from the implementation of new technologies in established lean practices is not clear. The purpose of this study that consists in a systematic literature review is assessing how these emerging disruptive technologies can enhance lean practices and analyse their impacts and benefits for organizations that are moving towards this new industrial paradigm.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of Scrum for project and team management in PBL teams in higher education. To attain this goal, a study was carried out to analyze students’ perceptions about Scrum as an effective method for PBL teams. Based on two different editions of PBL that used the Scrum method with different characteristics in each approach, this paper aims to identify the best practices for effective team and project management and draw recommendations for successful use of scrum in PBL approaches. The authors used an exploratory case study carried out within an engineering program at the University of Minho, Portugal. The research design was based on an explorative quantitative and qualitative approach. Implementing Scrum in PBL teams helps students to keep the project running smoothly and draws greater awareness on how to manage the project and teams in a more effective way. Findings show that task assignment, performance monitoring, visual management and regular feedback were considered the main advantages of using Scrum in PBL teams, which had a positive impact on student performance. However, for the success of Scrum, students recognize the role of the Scrum Master and Project Owner as vital to guide the teams in a sustainable way. Research on the application of Scrum in Education is scarce and mostly exploratory. This paper is among the very few empirical studies consolidating knowledge on the implementation of Scrum approaches to improve learning in higher education. More specifically, it brings a valuable contribution on how to improve specifically team performance in PBL teams with the use of agile approaches such as Scrum.

BACKGROUND: Lean Production Systems (LPS) have become very popular among manufacturing industries, services and large commercial areas. A LPS must develop and consider a set of work features to bring compatibility with workplace ergonomics, namely a

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to compare the well-known value stream mapping (VSM) with a recent tool named waste identification diagram (WID), regarding the capacity of information representation and easiness of interpretation.Design/methodology/approach: The work begins with a brief literature review comparing the main tools for representation of production units, with special emphasis on VSM and WID, in terms of ability to identify several types of waste. Then, the authors developed the VSM and the WID of a specific production unit and after that several groups composed by students of Industrial Engineering (IE) and/or professionals from industry were asked to analyse/interpret only one of these diagrams. Finally, a questionnaire with closed and open questions was applied to the groups to evaluate the analysed tool.Findings: In general, the results revealed that WID is more effective than VSM and participants recognized that most of the WID elements are relevant. Specifically, a measure coined overall effectiveness was applied (based on the response time and percentage of correct interpretations), indicating a clear advantage of WID (22 per cent of correct interpretations per minute) compared to VSM (9 per cent of correct interpretations per minute). The main drawback pointed to the WID is the lack of representation of the information flow.Originality/value: This work contributes to the IE field by revealing WID as a new promising graphical tool for representation of production units, especially in terms of identification/quantification of wastes. The tool was quantitative and qualitatively evaluated by persons both from academia and industry.