The sugarcane is one of the most economically important crops in Brazil, presenting a perspective of cultivated areas expansion for the next years. In reason of the increasing at the demanding, there is a need of maintenance and increasing field yield, optimizing the already available resources. One of the alternatives for the yield increasing is the improvement of agricultural operations involved in the production. It is necessary, because of the operational issues and involved cost, to identify those of more importance and establish the patterns to be attend by then. This way the objective of this work was to identify and evaluate the critical variables that are present in the sugarcane production process. The work was developed in two stages. The first one consisted of the identification of the critical variables through FMEA "Failure Mode and Effect Analysis". The second one was carried out in the field, in order to evaluate the most critical variable and determined the capacity of the process through the Cpk index. Seventeen variables were identified and among them the irregular spacing between furrows was considered as the most critical. The furrows systems guide, manual and automatic, are not capable of attending the tolerance limits adopted by the sugarcane mill. It is necessary to review these limits and/or analyze alternatives to improve the systems in order attend the wanted patterns.
mechanization; FMEA; process capacity
