E090: Guest Interview on Environmentally Conscious Nation Podcast from Aug 2021
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In today’s episode, I share the interview I had with D.J. Vagnetti, host of the Environmentally Conscious Nation podcast. I don’t think his podcast is still active, otherwise I would recommend listening directly to the episode.
This interview assumes that the audience doesn’t know much about process improvement or Lean or Six Sigma, so if you know someone who cares about the environment, it might be a good episode for them to hear.
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Transcript
Welcome to Environmentally Concerned Nation, the environmental show that goes way beyond water cooler climate debates. This podcast features the science, policy, politics, law, engineering, and public opinion that matters to you. Why? Because you are in control of the environment and no one else. Yes, you decide to go green or vegan. Our collective choices will determine the fate of our children. Welcome our host, DJ Vagnetti. DJ is an Environmental, Civil, and Water Resources Engineer, but this show is not about him but about the fate of young and future generations to come.
DJ (D): Welcome to episode five of Environmentally Concerned Nation. In this episode, Brion Hurley and I discussed implementing Lean Six Sigma so that you can improve your business bottom line. If you want to improve return of investment by optimizing business processes, learn the environmental impact of process waste, and increase business profits while you help the environment, don’t you move from where you are. Welcome, Brion.
Brion (B): Thank you. Thanks for having me.
D: Great having you. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background?
B: I think what I’ll add to what you already covered was I didn’t really know what I wanted to get into when I went to school. I tried a couple of different majors and what I landed on was math and statistics. I really liked it, so I tried to figure out how am I going to use this when I have to go look for a real job. I landed at an aerospace company and they had a need for statistics training. Basically, what I did was teach a lot of the engineers and support team about statistics that they took in classes but they didn’t really get a chance to maybe apply or could figure out how to apply it to their work. My job was really to help translate what they learned into real-world applications at their jobs. That’s what I was basically doing was being a statistical support person for a lot of people in the company.
With that led to a bigger initiative around how do we fix all our processes, not just the manufacturing part, so started to teach classes at the company and work with other departments to say everybody has processes, everybody can collect data on their processes, and we should be using that data to improve it. I spent about 18 years at different locations in Iowa and Oregon and Florida just learning and practicing and, hopefully, getting better and better at how I can teach people and help coach them on improving their process.
D: That’s great, but how did it all start in the environmental side?
B: Probably 15 years ago, when I started to notice some of the environmental problems going on, I became aware of climate change and reading more about pollution and water quality, the dirtiness of the energy sources that we’re using, like coal and the impact it has on the climate. What I noticed was there was data and then what I made the connection to was, hey, I know what to do with data. That’s what I’ve been working on in terms of fixing yield problems and inventory problems at work. What if I could use my skills to work on environmental problems, how much stuff going to the landfill? I know how to look at data and break it down and look for opportunities in that.
So I got excited and started to look at what could I do inside my company to get more involved with the sustainability effort. So I reached out to a couple of people and made some connections and started to work through getting involved in some green teams at different locations that I worked at.
D: That’s awesome.
B: That’s really where I got excited that, hey, this is something I’m passionate about and it’s something I think I can assist with.
D: That’s great. Let’s start in order to understand the reasoning behind Lean and Six Sigma. What is Lean thinking?
B: Lean is a methodology that was evolved from studying and looking at what the Japanese companies, specifically Toyota, they’re the ones that were most researched, they were trying to figure out why did they make this monumental improvement in their manufacturing quality for electronics and automobiles from the 50s, through the 60s, through the 1970s, and 80s to the point that they were now beating and providing better quality products at a lower cost than the American automobile manufacturers. They were caught off guard and so there was a lot of research that went into what were they doing, and the term they came up with was called Lean. That involves a process of really engaging the employees in helping solve problems and looking at the processes in a new way to see the opportunities that maybe a lot of companies were not looking and noticing. It was just a way of looking at a process a little differently than what people naturally look at it.
D: That’s awesome. There’s five Lean principles. Can you tell us about them?
B: You bet. The first step is to first determine am I providing value, so is this something that the customer wants? it all starts there because if we determine that it’s not something they want, then every process step that goes along with that non-value-added activity is a waste of time and effort. So we first want to verify is this what you want, customer? is this really the reasons why you’re buying this product or this service?
Next, we look at it and say now that I understand that this is an important thing and we are providing something they want, what are the steps that it goes through, all the way from the order from the customer, all the way through the processes, across all the different departments involved? let’s look at the process in that perspective. We often look at processes very narrow, like what happens in shipping, what happens in procurement, what happens in production, what happens in the office paperwork side, but we don’t always connect all those processes together. That’s where you’ll see a lot of opportunity where there’s handoffs from one group to another and the process failed and gets stuck and it falls between the cracks. The customer is waiting and nobody really notices that it’s stuck. So you look at the value stream to help uncover these problem areas that you don’t always see naturally.
Then it goes to flow, which is how do you get the process to go smoothly so there isn’t delays and hiccups along the way so that the customer gets as quick of a response as possible because speed is really important for most customers. Then we move to pull, which is how do you wait until you get signals from the prior processes that you can move forward in your process, so you wait for some kind of notification. Traditionally, what we do is we just work on something and we shove it to the next person whereas pull would say you don’t go to the next process until the person says they’re ready for it because all you’re going to do is just create a pile of work for them. So you wait until they’re ready for it, and then you hand it over to them. That connects all the processes together much more smoothly.
D: Yeah, I saw that.
B: And then the final part is just perfection, which is you never stop improving. You can never be perfect, so you just keep improving over and over and keep going through that cycle.
D: I kind of looked at it like what I mean perfection, you can strive for perfection but you’re never going to reach it. I saw that and it kind of shocked me, but I understand what you’re saying though. That’s great that you had that down. What is a push and pull process and how does it differ from the five Lean principles?
B: It’s two of those five principles. You first start with flow, which is basically a push system. The idea is you move the process forward when you’re done with it. Let’s say that someone hands you a document and you have to fill in information on the document and then forward it to the next person. Flow says when it shows up, you work on it right away and you move it on to the next point and you just do one at a time so that you’re not batching your work. Batching is a big problem with Lean because it holds up the process. People like to do a stack of things at once and that slows down the whole process for each customer, so we try to break that and say do one thing and move it on so that the next person can get started on that item, whether that’s a purchase order or a design drawing or it’s a manufactured product or it’s an email. We want to do things in very small amounts of work and move them onto the next step as quickly as we can. Flow is aligned with the push system that you just move it on when you’re done.
Pull, you can’t move it on until the next person says I’m ready for it. That’s a big shift in the process, but what it allows you to do is if you see that the next person is not ready for it, you go off and do something else. You don’t just keep shoving more work at them. Or you go help them and you say, “What can I do to help you get unstuck so that we can help deliver to our customer faster?” Pull is a much further along, more mature way of running your process, but it helps you make sure you’re not doing too much of one thing that’s only going to go to the next process and sit there for a long time. It helps you uncover problems in your process much easier than if you just keep pushing the process through.
D: Okay, that’s great. Can you tell us what are the eight ways of Lean thinking that are known as TIMWOODS?
B: TIMWOODS, that’s one of the acronyms that was created to help people remember the eight types of waste. If you are looking at one of your processes, I encourage people to try and think through these wastes. If you spot them, that means there’s an opportunity there that you could possibly make your process more Lean. Each of the letters stands for a different word that might be a waste in your process.
T is for Transportation. Where you see things moving around, we want to challenge and say is that really necessary to move things around? maybe it’s being done unnecessarily or we could bring things closer to each other so it doesn’t have to travel as far. Inventory means that there’s something stuck in the process because things are piling up. It could be you have a large number of emails in your inbox. That means there’s a backlog of things that you haven’t gotten to read yet, so that means there’s more coming in than you can handle and maybe that’s a problem. Motion, maybe I have to click 17 times in my computer to get the file I need. Is there a way I can find a shortcut to that that requires less motion and less activity and less movement on my screen?
W is Waiting. If I’m waiting for someone to get back to me or waiting for someone to return from break or from vacation, how come they’re the only ones who have the answers? How do we get it so other people could answer those questions and I don’t have to wait for that person? Overprocessing would be going above and beyond what the customer really wants. You think that they like this value that you’re providing, but it might be a waste of time because they don’t care about that extra work that you’re putting into it.
D: It’s like an overkill.
B: Yeah, it’s overkill. We think it’s good and so we put all this extra time and effort into and it’s just slowing down the process because they could care less. Overproduction would be working ahead too early on something because there’s a risk that things change and you don’t need it anymore. I think we experienced this with COVID, that there’s a lot of planning and work that was done anticipating a normal year and then you have something like that happen. Then all that work was out the door because we have to redo our whole plan because we were working on things way in advance of when we needed to actually start working on it, so all that effort was wasted basically.
And then S is an optional one in the people add in, but it’s for Skills, meaning are we leveraging people fully? Are we picking their brains for ideas? Are we asking for their input? Are we involving them in the work or are we just telling them to follow the rules and do what you’re told? That’s not a good use of their talents and skills. You’ve got lots of people in your organization perhaps that have ideas and how do we pull those ideas out of everyone’s head so we can make the processes run better.
D: I believe this TIMWOODS saying comes from Toyota, no? Is that right? And they didn’t use the last one in their process and then somebody added it in the 90s.
B: Yeah. I think they were naturally better at doing that, and so it was less of a problem. And then when they translated it over to the Western cultures, they realized that we don’t do a very good job of that so we need to add that in because we don’t leverage our employees very well, so they had to add that point.
D: Which are the environmental impacts of these wastes?
B: The thing that I really noticed was, in some documentation that our United States Environmental Protection Agency put together about the time when I started to get concerned about the environment, there was some work that they did to promote Lean and Six Sigma as a way to reduce environmental impacts to companies. They published those seven or eight types of wastes and then they put together a little table that said here’s what the environmental impact is for each of those.
For example, defects, that means you might have to throw away material and that means it’s going to go into the landfill or it’s going to have to be put into a hazardous container and then it’s going to have to be protected and stored, and all that creates some environmental impact. Or if you have a lot of excess inventory, that means you have to have more space to store these items, and then someone has to light the space and heat and cool the space and that requires energy. All these wastes have an environmental impact to it, so just by improving your processes, you’re probably going to naturally reduce your environmental impact as well.
D: Awesome. What is Six Sigma?
B: Six Sigma was a response to the Lean initiative that was coming from Japan. They were looking at some of the techniques that were very popular around World War II but were forgotten. It was around data collection and data analysis and statistical tools and quality improvement tools. They put together a program at Motorola to try to be competitive with the electronics industry and, basically, the competitors in Japan who were beating them on reliability, cost, and quality. They put together a program that was around how you work through problems in a more methodical way using statistical tools. That became pretty popular in the mid-80s and 90s, and that’s where a lot of my training was started when I started to learn about statistics. That was a large part of the Six Sigma program.
D: I understand that Six Sigma comes from the number of standard deviations from a normal process. Can you give us an example on how an entrepreneur that is not literate in statistical mathematics can start implementing these improvements on their own?
B: That can be a little scary for people when they start talking about data and statistics. Some people really gravitate to numbers and others don’t like it at all. They get scared off by the numbers a little bit and that’s okay.
D: I’ve seen it.
B: At a very simple level, you don’t have to jump right into statistics right away. What Six Sigma says is first understand what the problem is. Make sure you understand what you’re trying to accomplish and let’s be clear about the issue. So if you have customers that are upset, do you have costs that are too high? do have processes that take too long? do you have risks that you haven’t dealt with yet that could come and impact your business? first, let’s figure out what the problem is, and then if we can get some data, that would really help us solve the problem. If not, then we’ll have to gather the right people together to talk through and try to figure out ways we can improve, so there’s statistical tools and there’s also nonstatistical tools involved with it.
For someone starting off, I think the main thing would be first, can you measure things about your process to see how you’re doing. Do you have customer feedback? do you have measurements of how long it takes you from the time you get an order from a customer until you fulfill that order? those are some basic metrics you can collect. And then what is your cost and what is the overhead of your processes to operate them?
Those could be starting points for collecting data. What Six Sigma says is let’s look at how that data changes every day, every week, every month, and look at the variability. The pattern in how that variability occurs can highlight potential opportunities or problems in your process, and so let’s collect the data and then let’s study the data and that will help us maybe identify and solve problems that are affecting our business.
D: Great. What is the relationship between Lean thinking and Six Sigma?
B: I think a lot of people are saying that there is some overlap. Probably since the early 2000s, there’s been an effort to try to merge these initiatives together. they are different, but there is some commonality. The commonality is that they’re both focused in on customer improvement and customer satisfaction. They both utilize data. Six Sigma is a little heavier on the data analysis piece, but Lean also uses data quite a bit. They both involve teams, so we don’t just do things on our own. We involve other people in our organization to participate and learn and understand and solve problems.
But for Lean, I would say it’s a little heavier on building relationships and developing people to help solve problems where Six Sigma is a little heavier on getting very detailed data to solve more difficult, complex problems. Together, they can complement each other pretty well, but they are different methodologies. What I’ve seen mainly is that the Six Sigma approach has tried to incorporate more Lean into it going forward.
If you like this topic, please check out Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba. Volume 1 is released and available through Amazon. we will soon have an Audible version coming out early in 2020, and we’re working on Volume 2 as we speak. Volume 1 has eight chapters written by different authors who share their experiences applying Lean and Six Sigma to not-for-profit organizations.
D: What is Lean Six Sigma?
B: Probably in the last 10, 20 years, there’s been an effort to try to merge them together into one program. I would say it’s, primarily, Six Sigma has brought in Lean into its skill set and into its toolset whereas I think traditional Lean has maybe brought in a little bit of Six Sigma but stayed pretty focused on the methodology that has been pretty popular. Again, there is overlap there, but primarily Lean Six Sigma is taking Six Sigma and inserting in Lean elements and Lean thinking into it.
D: How does Lean Six Sigma fulfill Goal Number 12 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, responsible consumption and production?
B: That’s what I really try to focus in on is what can I do to impact those Sustainable Development Goals. There’s 17 goals that have been established and deal with issues like inequality and hunger and poverty and clean energy.
D: And climate change.
B: Yeah, climate change. If we were able to put all of our efforts towards those goals, we’re going to make some great improvement as a society and as the whole world.
D: Indeed.
B: One of those goals is Number 12, the sustainable consumption and production. Underneath that, there are some efforts to reduce things like food waste, which is inefficient use of food where we spend all this effort growing food, and then we lose food along the way from the time we grow it, to pick it, to process it, transport it, to get it to the shelves.
D: That’s one of the indicators.
B: Yeah, there’s inefficiencies along the way. The more we can improve those inefficiencies so that less food is wasted, the more we can get to people. Maybe we can lower the cost because there’s more available there and we can deal with things like hunger and we can deal with things like poverty and we don’t have the climate impact of having food go into the landfill where it breaks down and turns into methane.
D: So it’s not only Goal Number 12 you’re fulfilling here. You’re covering a lot of bases with what you do.
B: That’s another thing with some of these improvement methods is you can’t look at them in isolation. There are so many connections between these different activities you do. When you do something over here, it affects here and here and here as well and we have to understand that everything operates in a system; it’s not just isolated activity. If I change my process and how I do things, I might be impacting people downstream from my process in a negative way and I have to be cognizant of that and be aware of that and talk to people and say, “I’m going to change my form. Is that going to affect you?” If so, I can’t change my form that way. I have to come up with a different idea.
Just like with reducing energy is another goal for Number 12, how do I look for opportunities in the data? Can I pull data from our energy usage and look for spikes in the data that highlight where we’re using way too much energy? maybe it’s telling us that we have equipment that’s about to break down or that we’re leaving equipment running at night and those are opportunities to improve.
There’s also some things with moving to an economy that isn’t so consumption-based. What if we can move to things like reusable? when I was running a nonprofit and in profit Portland called Recycling Advocates, one of the campaigns I worked on was called the coffee cup reduction. We were trying to get people to bring their coffee cups to coffee shops instead of everyone getting a disposable paper cup. If you bring your own cup, then you can reuse that cup over and over and over again and we’re not spending our time and money on making more paper cups, but instead, we’re reusing items. That all goes into Goal Number 12, to look for more sustainable ways that we can still have an economy that isn’t damaging the environment.
D: What does the acronym WASTE stand for and why is this relevant to Lean Six Sigma?
B: This was really powerful. I took a course called The Green Manufacturing Specialist. What that was was a way to connect manufacturing with environment. I took it at Purdue University and they introduce this acronym, WASTE, which is a word that we use in process improvement, but they used the letters to represent environmental impacts. W is for Water, A is for Air Emissions or pollution, S is for Solid Waste, like things that would go through the landfill, go in your trash or rubbish, T is for Toxins like hazardous waste materials or pollutants, and E is for Energy.
That’s a great place to start when you’re thinking about what are my environmental impacts as a business is to look at those five areas to start with and remember that acronym and say how much water am I using? do I pollute something into the air? what do I throw away in the trash and that goes to the landfill? how much hazardous material do I generate if I do? hopefully, you don’t have any hazardous material. And then how much energy am I consuming in my business? these might be your impact on the environment and anything you could do to lower those will probably lower your costs and it’ll help you lower your environmental footprint.
D: That’s great. Many people believe that implementing an environmental waste program into their business workflow will raise costs. How is this not true and actually sustainable in a profitable solution?
B: It does feel like a cost for a lot of people. Maybe they’re having to pay somebody to come haul away their materials or their trash or their hazardous material. They look at it and say, “I wish I didn’t have to pay that money,” but someone’s got to pay for it. Someone’s got to cover that cost and there’s a lot of things that happen that aren’t covered in cost. If companies pollute into the air, that affects people’s health. We see that people who live closer to coal-fired power plants have higher rates of asthma. They’re getting medication for that and they’re going to the hospital for asthma attacks more often. They’re paying for that cost, not the companies that are producing that pollutant that’s going into the air. And so when we look at the cost, sometimes those externality costs are not covered fully by the businesses that are producing it, and so we want to make sure, if we’re going to have an economy and mainly the economies of capitalism are based on money, then people have to pay their fair share.
D: Exactly, and make them accountable.
B: Exactly, and so they can make the right decisions about what to do. But if they’re only paying for half the cost, they’re going to have the wrong perception about their impact. So the first one is try to get all the costs allocated to the right people who are causing those costs and causing those impacts, but the way to look at it is this also can help you highlight problems in your process.
When you have these costs, like let’s say you’re having to have someone pick up your dumpster three times a week, what’s going into the dumpster? you’ll find that these are problems in your process like you have scrap or you have defects that you’re throwing away. Why don’t we fix those problems through process improvement work so that you don’t create those defects and you don’t have to throw it away, and then you can lower your cost? so I would say try to look at it in a different perspective so that you are seeing these as opportunities to lower your costs, not try to find a way of not paying for those impacts that you’re having.
The other thing would be I think, a lot of times, people will just say, “Let me change out my light bulbs. That’ll be a good reduction.” That’s great and you can go to more efficient light bulbs, for example, and that will lower your energy costs for sure. But what I’d like to encourage people to do is study how you use your lighting. Look at the lights themselves because I’ve worked on some of these types of projects and what we noticed when we actually studied the process was we are overlighting the space. We’re putting way too much light than is necessary for the hallways and the office space. And so maybe we cannot only replace the bulbs, but we can replace with fewer bulbs and still maintain the value that the employees want, which is being able to see their work and do their job. But do we need to have 10 light bulbs there? Maybe we can get away with 5. And so not only can we lower costs, we can actually lower it even further by being smarter and more efficient about how we utilize these resources.
One of the improvements I did, we had so many quality problems that we were going to buy two machines. Through improvement, we ended up realizing we improved it so much, we only needed to buy one machine. That’s a big improvement to the environment when you don’t have to purchase an entire machine and have it run all day long. Another organization, they produce homes and part of it, they have a lot of leftover wood scrap. What they did is they came up with a process to better organize those scraps. That allowed them to use those scraps in the new products. They cut down the amount of wood that was going into the landfill and that lowered costs and they used less raw materials, which were lowering their overall costs too.
So they just got smarter about how they organized their scrap pieces. They put it by size in a nice easy way for people to find and grab because, before, it was in a big pile and they were just like, “Forget it. It’s not worth the effort.” But they just take a little bit of effort of putting it away nicely, they could reuse those wood pieces for the future and they cut other wood costs. Right now in the US, wood is really expensive because of COVID and everyone doing home projects and stuff, so they’re saving even more money now because of that.
D: What is kaizen and where does it come from and how does it relate to Lean Six Sigma?
B: Kaizen is a Japanese word that ties back to this word of continuous improvement. They really focus in on small, incremental improvements. Oftentimes when I talk to companies, they want to look at large, big improvements. “We need a new database. We need a new system. We need to get new machines. We need a new building.” I want to encourage them to start small and say let’s just go to the workers themselves and ask them what do they need to do their job easier and simpler. Sometimes, they’ll just say, “I just want a hook to put my tool on when I’m done,” or, “Can I get a chair that lifts up and down because my back is hurting?” or, “Can we move this a little bit closer, because every day, I walk back and forth?” Let’s start with those simple, small things that are easier to implement that help the workers do their jobs safer, faster, easier, less struggle, less frustration from them. Then what we’ll allow them to do is think more about the way they can do their job and they’ll come up with even better ideas.
The idea is let’s start small. Let’s do lots of small things instead of doing one big, large improvement. What we’ll find is we’re probably going to get better improvement by doing that than when you try to throw– I’ll use the baseball analogy. We’re trying to hit home runs with these big projects. Let’s just hit a lot of singles and let’s bunt and let’s steal bases. Let’s use that approach instead of swinging for the fences.
D: I got you. How can environmentally concerned entrepreneurs benefit from implementing Lean Six Sigma?
B: What I’ve seen that’s really been powerful is there is cost reduction for sure. If you can identify these environmental impacts that you’re creating and focus some attention on them, you will be able to lower the costs because it’s just not something people spend a lot of time looking at usually. They’re focused in on the core business and they forget about these impacts that are going on. They don’t look at the trash to see what’s going in there. They’re not looking at the water bill very closely. They’re not looking at their electricity usage very much.
So I think just focusing on that will allow you to lower costs, but what I’ve really noticed, and there’s a lot of studies that support this, that employees want to know that their companies are doing the right thing. When you are focusing your attention on the environmental impacts, you’re showing your employees this is something we care about and we’re willing to spend time and effort on it. Companies like that and they say, “I like working for a company that cares about these types of things.” So what you get is more engaged employees who end up being more productive and they stick around longer because they like working for the company because they think that the company is doing the right things and they’re proud to work there. That’s huge cost benefits for a company to retain employees or get more productivity out of them because they are excited about the work that’s they’re doing.
There’s also you can lower your chance of getting a fine from your local government agency who finds that you weren’t managing your processes very well and you were allowing things to go down your drain that you weren’t supposed to or you were sending things in the landfill that weren’t supposed to go in there like batteries or liquids or something. You can avoid some of the risk if you have better focus on those things.
I’ve also gotten, some of the work we’ve done, we’ve gotten featured in the local paper. How much does it cost to run an ad in your local newspaper or magazine or on a local newspaper website versus you got a free ad by showing that you were doing some environmental projects? You can get some free marketing and publicity for some of your work that would be expensive to do if you were just purchasing an ad for that.
You also get some small benefits by just educating your employees on, hey, this is what to look for. This is where you shut off the power on that machine when you go home at the end of the day. This is where the light switches are that when you go on break or lunch, just flip those lights off for 30 minutes. Those are small improvements, but those add up over time to save money. Or teach them how to spot air leaks in hoses or how to notice water leaks or condensation on the water pipes where maybe there’s a problem. Those are small things that you can educate your employees on that they can, hopefully, help you identify issues when they’re small before they become really big problems.
D: How can you get started on this path and what are the resources for these people, for these entrepreneurs?
B: I would say, for most people, if they’re not familiar with Lean or Six Sigma, I try to give a real simple, high-level overview, but I also put together a free course that is available for everybody. It’s called Lean Six Sigma and the Environment.
D: I took it yesterday.
B: Yeah, I saw you signed up there. That’s a great free resource to go through and learn about some of the tools and we go deeper into things like 5S and the value stream and stuff like that. That’s definitely a great place to start and that’s why I created the course was a starting point for people new to Lean and Six Sigma who care about the environment.
Another resource would be if, you’re just starting a business, like you’re an entrepreneur and you don’t have a full product ready to go yet or a service ready to roll out, there’s a methodology called Lean Startup that is really good that uses Lean principles to help entrepreneurs develop a product. Things like MVP, that comes out of Lean Startup methodology. There’s actually a book called Lean Startups for Social Change where he talks about how do you design and come up with a product or service that also is good for the community and good for the environment, so that would be a good resource to check out.
If you’re already operating a business, then I would reach out to your local government agencies because they are trying to work with businesses and they are trying to be of assistance. Just say, “This is what we’re doing,” if you don’t mind having them come in and just look around. Most of the time, they’re not there to find something wrong and get you in trouble, especially if you reach out to them first. You can just say, “I’m looking to do my part. I’m trying to do the right thing. Can you help with your expertise? can you come and give us some tips or advice?” Most of them would be happy to do that and they love that you’re being proactive rather than they find something wrong with what you’re doing and try to come back later and you’re going to get in trouble for it later. So be proactive, reach out to those resources, and ask for help. That’s going to usually get a positive response from them.
I also encourage organizations, even if you’re small, to maybe set up a green team or encourage employees to get together and have a green team where they can bring up ideas that they care about. You can look for ways to do stuff with your cafeteria or maybe they want to do a recycling project at work or they want to figure out a way to change out the light bulbs. You can leverage your employees’ ideas through this green team effort. And then if you have a large company, then reach out to your Environment, Safety, and Health team or your Facilities team or, if you have a Lean Six Sigma or Process Improvement team, reach out to them and say, “Here are some of our environmental issues. Can you assist us with these issues?” because they often are looking at these things a little more closely or they can provide some facilitation skills or data analysis skills to help with that.
D: I’m a hydrologist and when I saw the course and when I looked at it, hydrology is more an art than a science it is, and I saw that, in the Lean Six Sigma processes and everything, it’s everything about a trained eye, where you see the weakness in the processes and that kind of thing. I had a teacher, my best teacher, my mentor that he used to take me to the river on a Saturday, and then when we came back to the classroom, he threw out a test. The test was four photographs, “What’s the problem here and how do you solve it?” So you get freaked out, but he was training your eye, so it’s kind of you’ve got to have a trained eye because you miss a lot of stuff if you don’t look closely.
B: It takes practice to spot the waste in your processes. You’ll look at it and you’ll say, “I don’t see anything,” and over time, someone says, “Did you see that? Did you notice that? Did you see where they walked back and forth three times? Did you see that they bent down three times? that’s not good. We don’t want them to do that. Did you see that someone got interrupted?” Those are the things. You practice over time and it doesn’t come naturally, you have to work at it, but once you see it, you can’t not see it anymore. It’s really powerful.
D: Yeah, I know the feeling. Any gold nugget or advice that you have for our audience of environmentally concerned entrepreneurs?
B: I guess I’d say just improving your processes is going to be good for your environmental impact. Like I said before, if you cut out defects and make your products or services higher-quality, you’re going to reduce less environmental impact. Whether it’s you don’t have to stay as late to work on that project and leave the lights on and leave the heating and air conditioning running, to actually not having as many defects that you have to throw away.
Another example would be I noticed sometimes that when we were receiving in parts when I worked at an aerospace company, they were wrapped up really tightly with a lot of bubble wrap and plastic wrap, and then they were taped up really tightly. They would say, “That stuff doesn’t cost very much money. The tape is inexpensive, the wrap is not expensive,” and I said, “But look at the labor. Look at how much time is being spent wrapping it, and then look at the time for the person who receives it and how much they have to unwrap.” The cost may not be huge, but when you look at the time that people are dealing with that, it was 5 minutes on both ends of that. That’s 10 minutes of labor and they’re doing that over and over again. The waste was just a pile of plastic wrap sitting there and they just said, “That’s light and it’s small. What’s the big deal?” but what it did is it highlighted look for the process that went with that and let’s look at that process. That’s where we saw the struggle and the frustration of, “I can’t get this thing open,” or, “I’m wrapping it so much, I’m wasting time doing this. It’s overkill.” So let those environmental wastes be a guide to help you define process inefficiencies.
D: Thank you, Brion. Learn more about how you can improve your results with process optimization with Earth Consultants at https://leansixsigmaenvironment.org.
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