Lean is Green

It can be said that lean is green.  A lean organisation understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it.

• The core idea is to maximise customer value while minimising waste.  
• Lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.
• The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.

To accomplish this, lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimising separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimising the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers.

• Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated points, creates processes which need less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time to make products and services at far less costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems.

A popular misconception is that lean is suited only for manufacturing.  This is simply not true.

• Lean applies in every business and every process.
• It is not a tactic or a cost reduction program, but a way of thinking and acting for an entire organisation.
• Businesses in all industries and services, including healthcare and governments, are using lean principles as the way they think and do.
• The word transformation or lean transformation is often used to characterise a company moving from an old way of thinking to lean thinking.
• This requires a complete transformation on how a company conducts business and takes a long-term perspective and perseverance.
• Like all large projects Lean/Green transformation is achieved through the implementation of many relatively small projects as part of a strategy for the development of the business.

Environmental waste is any unnecessary use of resources or a substance released into the air, water, or land that could harm human health or the environment.  Environmental wastes are often a sign of inefficient production, and they frequently indicate opportunities for saving cost and time.

• The obvious benefits of green and lean are energy savings, productivity savings, and savings from improved utilisation of materials.
• They can also lead to innovations that involve creation of new products out of waste materials.

 

For more information on how to implement lean, please contact us.

T:  +353 (0) 61 633644  E:  info@ecos.ie  W: www.ecos.ie