Lean Improvement Is Green Improvement

Green Enterprise is on the agenda of most corporations and organizations these days. Even the usually conservative Wall Street Journal published a whole section on Green Energies and Green Enterprise iniatives (Subscription may be required to see all the articles).

In one of the interviews featured here, there is a very interesting interview with Lee Scott Jr, CEO of Wal-Mart. Here, he says that Wal-Mart is nowhere near being Green, but they are definitely interested in cutting costs and Waste wherever possible!. He then talks about Wal-Mart working with suppliers to reduce packaging material.

The key phrase he used "Reducing Waste" is in itself the best way to approach Green-friendly business execution and ironically that is the same goal of Lean Process Improvement and the Toyota Production System (TPS)!

And both of them have a lot to teach about techniques to get there. TPS and Lean together can help achieve a company’s Green Goals much more quickly, than any effort that addresses superficial things like switching over to less power consuming computer servers or switching over to energy efficient fluorescent lights from incandescent or other more power consuming light bulbs!

They are important but I believe that companies and organizations can achieve their Green Enterprise goals by following techniques that Lean Process Improvement or Toyota Production System teach us! It’s the 80/20 rule - the 80% gains will come from the 20% contributors, quite often business processes alone!

Reduction of Waste can be in the form of Material, Labor, Physical Movement or Time!

TPS teaches us that Value Added Analysis can eliminate waste from material. Packaging material is a classic example of something that adds minimal value to the end consumer! How many times have you been frustrated with trying to open a package during Christmas, especially those electronic items encased in a plastic bubble, much tighter than those mummies in Egypt! If you are not careful, you may end up with a plastic cut in your hands! Packaging material is more for the manufacturer and dealer of these goods than for the end customer! Without some minimal packaging, some percentage of these goods may be damaged and wasted, and guess who pays for all that waste? You, the end customer. So, to that extent it adds some value, but the current state of waste can be reduced gradually to the bare minimum packaging that eliminates damage in transit!

Lean Process Improvement addresses Waste in Labor, Physical Movement or Time! All of them contribute mightily to an organization’s green efforts. Reduction of Waste in labor obviously is friendlier to the environment, since you need less people, less offices, less airconditioning. And less people that churn out carbon emissions into the air commuting to and from work! Less physical movement also has the potential to cut down on fuel costs and emissions. Less wastage of Time again works just like reduction of Labor. Less number of people to achieve the same thing, more efficiency and effectiveness.

The relationship between Business Process execution and Green Success is a direct one. Green Success, Continuous Process Improvement and TPS all have the same goals - Reduction of Waste! And the 80/20 rule says that organizations that want to do the most Green contribution, can do good by concentrating on the Efficiency and Effectiveness of their business processes as well as waste of material that does not add value to the end customer! That’s a win-win all around - you achieve your Green Goals, costs are less, quality is better and the customer is happier!

This also shows that a Green Enterprise does not have to become so, out of the goodness of their hearts, but seeing the Green Money in it!

If there is to be an ecologically sound society, it will have to come the grass
roots up, not from the top down." - Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce