Resumo:
Industrial laundries, one of the representatives of the textile sector in Brazil, are an important support service for society, as they support the operation of hospitals, industries, hotels and others. However, these industries face management difficulties and have to deal with a lack of operational controls. In this sense, an integrative literature review was carried out to understand the context in which industrial laundries are inserted. The results of this review showed that there are few studies related to operational controls and the use of performance indicators to monitor the production processes of industrial laundries. Based on this result, a systematic review of the literature was conducted to analyze the use of performance indicators to control industrial laundry processes. This review focused on identifying which performance indicators are generally associated with the application of DMAIC method (define, measure¸ analyse, improve, control). DMAIC is part of the Six Sigma philosophy and serves as a standard roadmap to guide and facilitate the development of an improvement project, organizing the techniques used at each stage. The findings of the literature reviews made it possible to identify gaps and opportunities for future research in this area, among which the development of studies focused on improving production operations, the application of quality tools to improve production operations and the determination of indicators to control production operations and measure their performance. In order to contribute to fill these gaps, this work aims to reduce the rework rate in the process of cleaning the trousseau of an industrial laundry, appling the DMAIC method. The methodology adopted to achieve this was the case study, which was carried out in an industrial laundry in Belo Horizonte and the metropolitan region. The results of the case study made it possible to understand and analyze the flow of the trousseau washing process, in addition to measuring the rework rate, identifying the main causes and proposing actions to reduce it. Thus, the DMAIC method, as well as the use and development of performance indicators proved to be useful and capable of helping to improve production processes. Finally, this work had practical contributions to the laundry studied, which reduced the average percentage of rework from 3% to 1.6%, which represents savings of R$17.25 per day, and R$6295.62 per year.
