REVISITING SHINGO'S STRUCTURE OF PRODUCTION: AN ECONOMIC APPROACH BASED ON RAPID CAPITAL CIRCULATION

Productivity gain in industrial firms has been one of the most relevant challenges since the postwar period. Considering quality and organizational efficiency as essential requirements of global competitiveness, the structure of production model developed by Ohno and Shingo at Toyota Motor Co. still prevails as a reference for an increasing number of companies. This article aims at recovering the fundamentals of the Production Function Mechanism (PFM) proposed by Shingo in 1945, correlating it with the economic bias of capital circulation. Although PFM has had a direct influence on the intrinsic development of Toyota Production System (TPS) and later on the foundations associated with Lean, it's often not adequately referenced throughout the Production Engineering literature. The contribution of this work is associated with the theoretical discussion of the PFM, exploiting its economic impact through an empirical case. The study was conducted from a theoretical perspective throughout the literature review and an empirical single-case was employed to demonstrate the impacts on Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC) - a recognized metric for capital circulation. The results demonstrate that reducing lead time by improving the structure of productionbased on the PFM, contributes directly to a faster circulation of capital