During the first 10 years of the Simplification Project (1987-96) the number of ideas was regarded as small, although normal.   For the purposes of presentation, the number of ideas per employee was multiplied by 100 and therefore we could say for example that during this period x number of ideas was made per group of 100 employees.

Therefore, during the 1987 to 1996 period, the maximum numbr of ideas forwarded per inventor was 300 ideas, reflecting .31 idea per employee per year (31 per group of 100 employees).

In 1997, the Brasilata management decided to more vigorously re-launch the Simplification Project, whereby the celebrations were scheduled outside normal working hours on Saturdays and the Super Bowl was created.  In 1999 and 2000, the company nearly achieved its goal of one idea per employee per year.   

In April 2001, the company chief executive officer read the Flaherty (2001) article describing the company, Bic, a US company having 686 employees that had received 2,999 suggestions over the year, which translated into 4.4 ideas per employee.  It was a revelation to the board to find that the number of ideas per employee was not only low in comparison to Japanese standards.

Using ISO standard 9001 as a tool, preventive actions were taken, which gave rise to corrective actions, aimed at eliminating probable causes that had been identified.

The Corrective Action Plan was closed in January 2002 and a goal of four ideas per employee was established for that year and Brasilata employees began to be regarded as inventors.

The number of ideas continued to grow, and reached a level of 30 ideas per inventor through mid-2005, when this number increased steeply.

Just when this level had seemed to stablize, (30 ideias per inventor/year), a new enormous leap in this number took place in the second half of 2005. The annual number of ideas recorded for 2007, was then 102,867 and in 2008, 134,756 while 2009 came in at 165,545, reflecting annual growth in the number of suggestions of, 117,7, 145,2 and 181,9 per inventor, respectively, which numbers far surpassed even the Japanese average, according to JHRA and the National Association of Suggestion System.