World Class Manufacturing performance measurement using a maturity model and the FlowSort method

Abstract

The World Class Manufacturing (WCM) system is a set of best management practices that can provide organisations with significant performance results. At the same time, since organisations are in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, it is important that they continually assess this environment and, thereby, gain situational understanding to perceive and seize opportunities and threats, and consequently apply management practices strategically. Therefore, this paper proposes and empirically validates a model for evaluating the maturity of organisations when applying the WCM system. The authors combined the insights they had from the literature with opinions of WCM experts to develop the model. To support the problem of classifying organisations into the maturity levels defined, the FlowSort multicriteria method was used. The proposed model was applied in four companies and received a good evaluation and acceptance by those involved. This corroborated with the feasibility and usability of this instrument, in addition to which this method by proposing a new tool for evaluating the performance of production systems of companies that use WCM, in a VUCA environment, is intended as a contribution to the literature.