Lean Thinking as support to integration of Service areas

Lean Thinking is a management philosophy and/or business strategy initially developed to be applied in manufacturing environments, but which has been successfully used in non-production areas. This study was carried out in the Service Area of the Research and Development Center of Souza Cruz, which has some subareas working independently, but with some activities in common. This paper aims to describe the Integration Project among these subareas by using the Lean Thinking philosophy to optimize the distribution of available resources and increase process efficiency. This study was classified as an action research, with the following steps: current scenario, planning of actions; taking actions; and evaluating the results. By performing the Integration Project was identified several points of synergy, integration opportunities, eliminating waste and improving processes, and the main results were a 38% reduction in lead-time of the Sample Preparation and a 33% reduction on the total handling of materials