Staufen consultants led the pilot implementation of Lean Leadership in the cuts and ham areas of the Paraná plant and will now roll it out to the administrative areas as well.
With more than 1,600 employees, Alegra is part of a cooperative in Paraná that brings together more than 5,000 members. The company currently slaughters, on average, 3,500 pigs per day and the expectation is for consistent growth in the coming years, tripling the number of daily slaughters.
As an important part of its development, Alegra found a partnership with Staufen to achieve its goals. Since last year, after a detailed diagnosis, the project developed by Staufen has focused on the implementation of Shop Floor Management as a management model.
According to Staufen Consultant and Project Manager, Fabio Silva, Alegra needed a major evolution in structuring frontline leadership and in the evolution of leadership tasks at other management levels so that it could stabilize and improve the performance of its operations. “Among the first steps, we structured regular communication, divided it into levels and implemented the concept of Hancho, or “Area Leader,” and the hierarchical organization was totally readjusted based on this concept“, explained Fábio Silva.
Before engaging in more complex improvements, the Staufen team worked to activate Go&See practices and structured problem solving, focusing on prioritization, processes confirmation, and training people based on a mentor-mentor relationship regarding day-to-day problems. The team also defined easy-to-measure baseline indicators.
The Shop Floor Management model, with a focus on leadership tasks, was initially implemented in pilots in the cutting (export) area, namely in the ham shop over 3 leadership levels, together with the Hancho concept.
In this first stage, leadership routines were implemented to improve indicators and operational leaders were developed, which resulted in an improvement of practices and behaviors of daily management in a transparent, fast, and effective manner. Leadership performance in combating recurring problems and seeking to eliminate recurrences also grew substantially, positively impacting Alegra’s results in this first phase of the project.
THE FIRST PHASE WAS VERY SUCESSFUL. IMPLEMENTING IMPROVEMENTS RESULTED IN CHANGES NOT ONLY IN PRACTICES BUT IN BEHAVIORS, WHICH ENSURES LASTING AND EFFECTIVE TRANSFORMATION. WE INTEND TO FINALIZE THE IMPLEMENTATION BY THE END OF 2022, ALLOWING THIS CULTURE TO MULTIPLY EVEN MORE.
Matthias Tigges, Alegra’s SUPERINTENDENT
next steps
At the end of this first stage, Alegra had a high degree of maturity in the SFM pilots implemented in 2021, allowing the model to be replicated in other areas. Some operational and administrative areas, autonomously, proactively started their own initial implementation of the model and are in the experimentation phase.
The company’s senior leadership plan, in line with the strategic guidelines, is to implement the shop and office floor management models throughout the organization by the end of 2022. For the next steps, Alegra seeks to integrate all operational and administrative areas within the end-to-end shop floor management model.
