Lean management and innovation in operational efficiency: the EGR project implemented by Pirelli Tyre Brazil in Santo André plant

O trabalho tem como objetivo avaliar e descrever analiticamente a implementação de práticas de manufatura enxuta pela Pirelli Pneus no seu complexo industrial da América Latina. Além de uma descrição estruturada e ampla dos princípios de produção de Toyota e fundamentos teóricos do Lean thinking, uma ênfase especial será dedicada ao projeto EGR (Especialistas em Gestão da Rotina), como uma ferramenta estratégica para ser usada pela empresa multinacional italiana no futuro próximo, de modo a alcançar um resultado mais eficaz e eficiente na gestão da rotina diária. Este projeto, que representa um componente significativo do Pirelli Manufacturing System (PMS) e, principalmente, voltado para supervisores e gestores de plantas, consiste principalmente em ajudar a empresa a desenvolver a capacidade empresarial para avaliar corretamente o gap potencial existente entre os resultados atuais e os esperados, para tanto entender os desvios, bem como as causas subjacentes, e melhorar continuamente o desempenho da empresa por meio da padronização de processos e redução de desperdicios. Esses objetivos podem ser perseguidos, atuando em dois meios essenciais: habilidades técnicas e comportamentais de liderança para apoiar cada equipe de projeto; uma maior eficácia na gestão de indicadores de desempenho nas diferentes unidades de fábrica, de acordo com KPIs estabelecidos no nível central pelo Head Quarter. Além disso, a investigação será focada na experiência peculiar da planta de Santo André, onde o EGR começou como piloto, com o objetivo de captar as alterações relevantes (no lado organizacional e econômico) que este projeto trouxe para a empresa, através da realização de pesquisa de campo e entrevistas, que são orientados a recolher provas, considerações e opiniões de todos os principais atores envolvidos.

Public debt management, monetary policy and financial institutions

Despite the large size of the Brazilian debt market, as well the large diversity of its bonds, the picture that emerges is of a market that has not yet completed its transition from the role it performed during the megainflation years, namely that of providing a liquid asset that provided positive real returns. This unfinished transition is currently placing the market under severe stress, as fears of a possible default from the next administration grow larger. This paper analyzes several aspects pertaining to the management of the domestic public debt. The causes for the extremely large and fast growth ofthe domestic public debt during the seven-year period that President Cardoso are discussed in Section 2. Section 3 computes Value at Risk and Cash Flow at Risk measures for the domestic public debt. The rollover risk is introduced in a mean-variance framework in Section 4. Section 5 discusses a few issues pertaining to the overlap between debt management and monetary policy. Finally, Section 6 wraps up with policy discussion and policy recommendations.

Social media crises in the organization: exploring management strategies through cases from France and Brazil

The aim of this Master’s thesis has been to shed light on the response strategies that organizations are implementing when facing a crisis created on or amplified by social media. Since the development of social media in the late 1990s, the interplay between the online and the offline spheres has become more complex, and characterized by dynamics of a new magnitude, as exemplified by the wave of “Twitter” Revolutions or the Wikileaks scandal in the mid 2000s, where online behaviors deeply affected an offline reality. The corporate world does not escape to this worldwide phenomenon, and there are more and more examples of organizational reputations destroyed by social media “fireballs”. As such, this research aims to investigate, through the analysis of six recent cases of corporate crises (2013-2015) from France and Brazil, different strategies currently in use in order to identify examples of good and bad practices for companies to adopt or avoid when facing a social media crisis. The first part of this research is dedicated to a review of the literature on crisis management and social media. From that review, we were able to design a matrix model, the Social Media Crisis Management Matrix, with which we analyzed the response strategies of the six companies we selected. This model allows the conceptualization of social media crises in a multidimensional matrix built to allow the choice, according to four parameters, of the most efficient (that is: which will limit the reputational damage) response strategy. Attribution of responsibility for the crisis to the company by stakeholders, the origin of the crisis (internal or external), the degree of reputational threat, and the emotions conveyed online by stakeholders help companies determining whether to adopt a defensive response, or an accommodative response. The results of the analysis suggest that social media crises are rather manichean objects for they are, unlike their traditional offline counterparts, characterized by emotional involvement and irrationality, and cannot be dealt with traditionally. Thus analyzing the emotions of stakeholders proved to be, in these cases, an accurate thermometer of the seriousness of the crisis, and as such, a better rudder to follow when selecting a response strategy. Consequently, in the cases, companies minimized their reputational damage when responding to their stakeholders in an accommodative way, regardless of the “objective” situation, which might be a change of paradigm in crisis management.