On Tuesday, November 13, 2018, Orlando CHIRINOS, PhD student in Engineering Sciences at the Systems and Materials for Mechatronics Laboratory (SYMME), will defend his thesis entitled "Dynamics of continuous improvement processes, Maintaining the performance cycle."
The defense will take place at 9:30 a.m. in room B014 on the Annecy campus.
Thesis summary
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 context of continuous improvement. This thesis addresses issues related to the sustainability of continuous improvement initiatives: what are the reasons for the difficulties in implementing sustainability? How can a new interpretation of the term sustainability help to ensure the sustainability of continuous improvement initiatives? What are the elements that characterize this definition? And what maturity reference model can we propose? A bibliographic analysis and the PRISMA methodology were used to identify interpretations of sustainability, which were categorized using different dimensions. Based on the results of exploratory research, this thesis also identifies a group of sixteen elements that have 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. This is particularly true when applied to a context of continuous improvement, in which a dynamic definition is necessary. This thesis also shows how the identified elements are perceived, and more specifically, what their impact is on sustainability. It is thus possible to identify two main groups of elements: those that are more technical in nature and those that have a more noticeable human interaction. Similarly, studying how these elements are deployed in companies clearly shows that the Check and Act stages of their implementation in companies 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 initiatives can be addressed within companies. To this end, the design of a positioning model based on maturity is proposed. This allows companies to assess the degree of maturity of their improvement initiatives and to target the elements that require particular attention.