Development of a conceptual model integrating management systems and the Shingo Model towards operational excellence

To remain competitive in the marketplace, organizations are seeking the adoption of management models and tools that will allow them to find better and more effective practices to reinvent themselves, and continuously improve their business processes and product’s quality in a sustainable way, hence pursuing the ultimate goal of reaching enterprise excellence. The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual model that relates the requirements of the ISO Management System Standards with the dimensions and guiding principles of the Shingo Model for Operational Excellence. The proposed approach allows an organization with and existing management system based on one or more ISO Management System Standards to adopt and perform an assessment tool to evaluate its level of maturity regarding the adoption of the best practices and behaviours prescribed by the Shingo Model, which is a novelty contribution of this research. The validation of the proposed assessment tool took place in a Portuguese organization from the automotive sector, having comprised two moments: in the first one, an external assessor performed a set of behavioural observations that acted as a base to assign a score, while in the second moment such score was internally obtained through a survey that was filled by the organization’s employees. The results reveal that these two methods converge to similar conclusions, hence confirming that the proposed model has the potential to enable an organization to assess the maturity level of its management system regarding the adoption of the guiding principles of the Shingo Model for Operational Excellence. A limitation of this research is that the model was only validated in a single company.