Use of A3 report by industrial engineering students as a tool to analyze and interpret a case study

Abstract

Lean Thinking is a philosophy which principles were redesigned from Toyota Production System (TPS) by Womack and Jones of MIT. Currently, Lean Thinking principles are taught in the academy and are applied in all sectors, from production to services. Services is what is provided to students in a university. Teachers provide a service to them, and they are the clients of this service. As so, teachers want to provide the best service, adding value to the client product. In order to do so, they search for new methods that create flow in the way students learn what they need to learn. Lean Thinking have been providing tools to the classroom to obtain such flow. This paper intends to present a tool, an A3 report, which was used by engineering students to analyze, interpret and report a published case study. This was a team assignment task among others. This task was assessed as a component for the final grade of a course of third year of Master Integrated of Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM). The presentations, A3 reports and discussions results were analyzed and compared using Bloom taxonomy levels and 3H taxonomy to infer about students learning. Main findings obtained were very positive.