Creating a Lean and Green Business System – 2degrees Network

Keivan Zokaei says businesses can no longer treat lean and green as a “nice to have” but it is now a “must have” and should be a top priority.

His new book, “Creating a Lean and Green Business System: Techniques for Increasing Profits and Sustainability”, is packed with case studies and examples of leading firms who use lean and green as simultaneous sources of inspiration in various sectors of industry—from automotive and retail to textile and brewing.

They recently worked with one of the largest sandwich factories in the world to reduce physical waste. They used simple techniques such as value stream mapping and A3 problem solving to prevent 1,000 tonnes of physical waste in just a few weeks, in a very mature industry that has already taken out a lot of waste. Lean and green can help organizations identify waste that they have overlooked by seeing their processes from a new perspective.

In researching the book, the co-authors also found out Toyota was not only the leader in efficiency and company performance (based on their Toyota Production System, aka Lean), but also topped the charts in their green performance as well. Toyota’s notion of monozukuri which means sustainable manufacturing and lies at the very heart of Toyota Production System (or lean thinking).

You can read the entire archived article at https://web.archive.org/web/20130506050824/http://www.2degreesnetwork.com/groups/managing-sustainability/resources/creating-lean-and-green-business-system/