Abstract.As global market competition is getting fiercer, and companies are looking at ways to stay on top, more and more organizations are looking at Lean Manufacturing and lean tools to support them in achieving their goals. Especially within the automotive industry, lean practices are very well received. The speed at which the automotive industry is evolving, especially but not only, in countries like Romania, leads to the need to carefully analyze lean manufacturing concepts, examine them against local production conditions, and to develop and standardize them. One of the most important things to take into consideration here is the application of an adequate problem solving technique to avoid waste. The objective of this research paper lies in analyzing and comparing the problem-solving methods recommended by the Toyota Production System, and to propose their appropriate application at shop floor, in relation to the specific problem type.

IntroductionNowadays organizations place a lot of focus on not only creating scaling opportunities but also on creating and constantly increasing the performance of their units. Whether this means increasing sales performance, manufacturing performance or creating highly efficient internal processes, successful companies have long reached the conclusion that in order to reach their organizational objective and goals a performance management is indispensable. Fundamentally, a performance system points out whether the organization is going in the right direction for achieving its goals. Through measuring performance, organizations manage to establish the extent to which activities within a specific process achieve their specified goals. Mainly this happens by calculating the deviation of the actual results and the desired outcome, which is the set goal. The level of performance is mostly expressed through a quantitative standard, value or rate. Like any other system though, in order to manage and measure performance key metrics are needed. Therefore, key performance indicators (KPIs) are needed. When selecting KPIs, successful organizations ensure that these are a good fit with their competitive environment and strategy.More and more organizations use strategically driven performance management systems that integrate actions across functional boundaries and focus on strategic results: integrated performance measurement [1]. Within the automotive industry, the performance measurement is built as a process for developing a performance direction. Thus many researchers have dedicated their research towards finding the most appropriate criteria for efficient KPI selection.This study further concentrates on finding the best criteria for finding, selecting and implementing the optimal KPIs at shop floor. For this purpose, first it offers a preview of the best practices and criteria used to select KPIs. Therefore this paper offers a preview of the most often KPIs encountered and discussed in previous research. Moreover, the study suggests defining KPI selection criteria starting with the fundamental idea of the seven wastes. Within the third chapter, six KPI selection criteria are proposed. Further on, identified research gaps are discussed and recommendations on how to fill these gaps are provided.

Abstract. Many researchers have studied the role and importance of communication and communication types for organizations and their work force. The topic of organizational communication is a constantly changing one. The thing that remains stable throughout this very wide topic is its purpose: communication is vital for the effectiveness and success of organizations of all sizes, types and cultures. In terms of type, one could split up topic by type as followed: verbal, visual and written. This research paper focuses on the visual component at shop floor within automotive organizations. It aims at giving the reader a structured overview on the most appropriate but also lean visual communication practices. In order to establish these methods at shop floor, a survey was conducted among nine big automotive companies in Romania. It was then followed up by a second survey dedicated to check the effectiveness of implementation of these methods in a big automotive organization. The paper presents the analyses, results and the conclusions of this surveys.

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