On Tuesday, November 13, 2018, Orlando CHIRINOS, PhD student in Sciences Pour l'Ingénieur at the Systèmes et Matériaux pour la Mécatronique (SYMME) laboratory, will defend his thesis "Dynamique des démarches d'amélioration continue, Maintien du cycle de la performance".
The defense will take place at 9:30 am, room B014, on the Annecy campus.
Summary of the thesis
The research presented in this doctoral thesis aims to enrich the body of knowledge on sustainability studies, by bridging the gap between its definition and its use in a continuous improvement context. This thesis addresses questions linked to the sustainability of continuous improvement approaches: what are the reasons behind the difficulties in implementing sustainability? how can a new interpretation of the term sustainability help to sustain continuous improvement approaches? what are the elements that characterize this definition? and what maturity reference model can we propose? A literature review and the use of PRISMA methodology were used to identify interpretations of sustainability, which were categorized using different dimensions. With the results of exploratory research, this thesis also identifies a group of sixteen elements with the potential to characterize this sustainability. A self-assessment survey was designed to evaluate these elements, taking into account their deployment within an improvement cycle based on the PDCA cycle. The results show that sustainability itself presents a series of paradoxes. Particularly when applied to a context of continuous improvement, where a dynamic definition is required. This thesis also shows how the elements identified are perceived, and more specifically what impact they have on sustainability. It is thus possible to identify two main groups of elements: those of a more technical nature and those with a more perceptible human interaction. Similarly, a study of the way in which these elements are deployed in companies clearly shows that the Check and Act stages of their implementation are the least developed. One of the most important contributions of this thesis is the way in which the deployment of elements promoting the sustainability of continuous improvement approaches can be approached within companies. To this end, the design of a positioning model, based on maturity, is proposed. 11 enables companies to assess the degree of maturity of their improvement initiatives, and to target the elements to which they should pay particular attention.