E120: Tackling Green with Lean – Lean Global Connection 2024

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In this episode, I share a presentation that the Lean Sustainability Global Network (an unofficial team that I’m involved with) gave at the Lean Global Connection virtual conference in Nov 2024.

We share how Lean principles can be applied to tackle pressing environmental challenges and improve processes.

For example, Lean and Green expands the traditional definition of waste to include:

  • Energy: Unnecessary use and reliance on polluting sources.
  • Water: Unnecessary consumption and associated treatment costs.
  • Materials: Losses due to cradle-to-grave design instead of a circular economy approach.
  • Garbage: Costs of disposal and environmental impact.
  • Transportation: Unnecessary movement and fossil fuel reliance.
  • Emissions: Pollution and potential fines.
  • Biodiversity: Direct destruction and overexploitation of resources.

This can be accomplished by integrating Green into existing Lean Practices:

  • Workshops and Training: Educate employees on Lean and Green principles and conduct problem-solving workshops focused on sustainability.
  • Applying a Green Lens to Existing Tools: Analyze processes like spaghetti diagrams and value stream mapping with a focus on environmental impact factors like carbon emissions, energy usage, and waste generation.
  • Gemba Walks with a Green Focus: Conduct “energy treasure hunts” to identify energy-saving opportunities and engage employees in finding sustainable solutions.

What is exciting is that implementing Lean and Green initiatives often leads to reduced energy consumption, waste reduction, and improved efficiency, translating into tangible cost savings. It also directly correlates process improvements with reduced carbon emissions, which is good for the planet, but also can attract environmentally conscious customers and investors.

At the end, we conclude with a call to action for those interested in joining an upcoming webinar related to the quiz results: building a business case for sustainability and integrating green into value stream mapping.

Listen to the podcast on this page, or watch the entire presentation with slides below, or go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ozlLpv_xg4

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Have you ordered the book, “Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 2)?” The book is made up of 8 chapters written about experiences from Lean and Six Sigma practitioners, to give you tips and tricks to help you work with nonprofits in your area. All proceeds donated to charity. Now available in audiobook as of Feb 2024. You can also order Volume 1 released in 2019.

Transcript

Christopher Thompson

On the main stage, we will have tackling green with lean so we have a full team, a very big international team where we have people from Brazil, from Chile, from Singapore, United States and Alexa there from Australia. So I will leave you guys here on stage. For the next half an hour to talk about this thing. So Alistair. Bruno. Hello. Hola. Hello.

Bruno Battaglia

Christopher again. Hello. Hola.

Marcelo Pinto

Well, welcome everyone. Thank you for being here. As Christopher said, we’re going to present on how to use lean in order to tackle sustainability problems. To give a little bit of context, we’ve been meeting for about. Maybe four years in order to make advancements in this field. In this presentation, we will cover a little introduction. Then we’ll make a little poll. We will present 2 very interesting examples of application and finally share the results of the poll with you. And if there’s enough time, probably answer a couple of questions. So a couple of numbers, in order to understand the magnitude of the challenges we’re facing. Since 1980, we’ve had approximately doubled, doubled the extraction of renewable and non renewable sources resources. Approximately 60 billion tons. And regarding greenhouse gases, we’ve also increased in 100% emissions, which has resulted in a race of the global temperature in about 0.7 Celsius degrees. And if we think that these challenges are recent. In 2010. 10. Between 2.2 and 3.2, billion people lived under water stress at least one month a year, so we can we could feel lots of slides with this kind of statistics. But I think the message is clear. We better start moving soon and we better. Start moving fast. So in order to address these challenges. Comes lean and green. What? What do we understand by lean and? Thing. We understand improving our processes, but with an additional or a different perspective, which is the perspective of the environment and the social perspective and in the same way that we define ways for classical lean to say somehow we can also define waste for lean green. We can define ways in which we can help. The first of these wastes is energy, which is the unnecessary use of energy, and from sources that pollute the environment. The second one. Which is regarding water is the cost of unnecessary use of water and probably treatment costs for the water we use. The third one, which is materials, is a waste that arises from the flows of design. When we design products. Thinking on a cradle to grave design instead of a cradle to cradle design and keeping the materials flowing in the economy for longer periods of time. The 4th 1 which is garbage is the cost of paying for something that we will finally throw away. And the cost of disposing this garbage also and regarding transportation is the cost of unnecessary transport and the impact that this transport produces in the environment due to the use of fossil fuels. Emissions. Is the cost caused by processes that produce emissions and could probably produce fines or cost fines for companies and the 7th is biodiversity? Which can be caused in two ways. The first one is the direct destruction of resources and the second one is the overexploitation of resources. So these are examples in which lean green can help tackle or help improve the environment, improve our processes from this different perspective.

Bruno Battaglia

Please guys you can check in your on your screen the option below poll and quizzes and we have three question on which we would like to know your opinion and we will back at the end to present the results OK. So please check if you can access the the poll. Here we will back later to share with you the results.

John Hamalian

OK. Thanks, Bruno. As Marcello has outlined sustainability, it’s it’s a big issue and especially the climate change part. It’s a problem that’s that’s not going anywhere and it’s it and if anything it’s gonna, it’s going to be getting worse. So a lot of companies have sustainability targets. The big ones for sure. The smaller ones are starting to do reporting. But they don’t have a very clear idea of how they’re. Going to get there. And that’s where the lean community can really help a lot with our problem solving innovation abilities. So one of the things you can do so Brian and I are going to go through a few things that you might think about to to bring into your lean work. One of them would be like you see on the slide. Is doing a workshop that could be a training workshop. Or a facilitated workshop on a. Real problem to solve. What you see in the slide is a is a one day training program that we’ve put together. It’s it’s been running for over a year. And we get participants that come and they learn. How to how to basically do what we’re talking about, bringing in some green into their lean work. This is the objective that if you can link these three things right, so lean thinking and practice. Right with. Actually improving the work but also making that to cost savings and carbon reduction. Then you have a real winner. So in the training we use something that’s very simple for everyone to understand, which is a hamburger restaurant and everybody can relate to hamburgers. So they go through an activities, a bunch of activities. To see how they can actually improve the work all the way from the kitchen all the way to the the counter to serve the burgers. That’s the way we’ve been running this training program. Everybody knows Tim Woods, right, or whatever acronym you want to use, the things we know in the lean such as the eight types of waste. Start looking through those through what you might think of as a as a green lens. So so the little green glasses. So so whatever you’re doing right and Brian will will go through a few things as. Well. Do what you do. Do what you. Know but start. Looking and measuring in. Environmental factors. If you look at the picture, right, so you’ve got, you have a few bars of soap, right that are already in a cardboard packaging and then they have then been put into a plastic bag. If you believe that, that would be a waste, which waste. Do you think that would? See if you can figure that out and put. It in the chat box. Do you think it’s transport? Do you think it’s motion? At least in my. View that would probably be over processing. All right. More more than. That’s needed to do the job. And what you’ll. See is for. For lean and green. Over processing is a really bad situation because almost always leads to more energy use, and then that’s always going to lead to more carbon for greenhouse gases released, right? So go to the next one, Alistair, see if you guys can figure this one out. So this is showing a label that’s off location. So let’s just assume that it was something that that wasn’t supposed to be like that. They have to throw it away, right. And then they have to make a new one which waste. Would that be? Alright, this one’s actually a little easier. Than the other one. So you guys probably figured this out, would be the waste of the defect, right? And and that’s a really important one also for leaning green because defects can be directly related to carbon, right? So think of this, whatever this is, right, yogurt or something? That’s you. Yeah. Let’s say it’s a defect. You have to throw it away with and you have to make a new one to replace it, right. And then by the way, you also have to throw away the old one, which then becomes land waste. And then there’s also a problem, right. So you’ve probably at least doubled the energy, and then that’s going to also relate back to carbon again. So actually reducing the the improving the quality of the work. Can have a direct correlation to greenhouse gases. Yeah. And and once you figure that out, then you’d be able to apply that to a lot of. Thanks. Right. So then the other topic that we do in the training, you can do this in your workshops as well, take just the basic process map. It doesn’t even really have to be a value stream map. And start measuring some green factors. For example, it could actually be carbon or some other greenhouse gas or or in any case measure the quality because like we just said, if you can improve the quality, you’ll be able to show and and in this case we actually show. The carbon footprint of 1 hamburger. It’s called life cycle analysis, so once you get that number. Then if you say, let’s say in the because in the in the training they have a bunch of discarded burgers because they burn the burgers, they drop the burgers. Customer orders are not right. So by improving the process the first time. Quality goes up. And then they can actually see a direct correlation with that and carbon reduction. Because there’s a there’s a carbon per hamburger, but. And then the teams basically come up with a better way of working and then they can actually see exactly how that will impact carbon. So it’s it’s a great correlation. And of course, it’s all interactive. So they also have have fun too. And then one more topic, the spaghetti maps that we. So a lot of us probably know, so also think about doing this with the green lens. And in this case, what they do, you probably can’t see the whole picture, but basically that’s a layout of the hamburger restaurant, including the the kitchen. And the preparation area all the way going to the counter and by just using some basic 5S workplace organization, they figure out how to do the work better and and actually use less space because there’s a grid pattern on the layout. And then if you go to the the next one. Cluster. Then by just moving some things around. They they figure out, see. Actually you might be able to make it out in the picture, but there’s less space used because they’ve they’ve actually redesigned the workspace. The less space they can calculate the utility cost that goes down and then from the energy saved, they can also calculate it’s a rough calculation, but it’s good enough they can rough roughly calculate the carbon that’s been. And then by the end of the day, they. Basically get a. A. That correlation between improving, improving the work and and actually helping the environment. Which is a great thing. So that’s a few topics that I want to share. Brian’s going to go through a few more with you.

Brion Hurley

So another approach we can look at is gimbal locks. And we can apply a green lens to that as well. And I thought this is a cool way to help. Think about some of the things Marcello mentioned earlier about waste. That we can use that. Acronym. To explain different environmental impacts like water, air emissions, solid waste, toxins and energy. So we already have this acronym in our heads. They can just apply it to their your organization and think about where are is the most opportunity. That we can go after from a cost standpoint, from an impact perspective in these five areas and that can help you focus in one of those areas and get started. So you could do an initial assessment of your organization or facility and say where of those five are the biggest opportunities for us. And then the next question is, well, what can we do to reduce the impacts in those areas? And so GE actually reached out to Toyota and said we want to go tackle energy and they developed this process called the energy treasure hunt. And through the approach of using lean methods and Kaizen and going to the gemba, they were able to conduct about 200 events with 3500 employees and they identified 500 kaisen improvements or many projects to run. The potential reduction if they implemented all of those would be about 700,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions and about $111 million. And so when I was at Rockwell Collins or now Collins Aerospace, we took that model and we applied that and did six different events like this. We called them energy go and see. But through those six events, we were able to engage employees in identifying energy reduction improvements. And found about $200,000 of opportunity. So there’s an article that will link to the GE Toyota collaboration around this, and then the EPA has some examples and data around the lean energy, lean energy and climate toolkit that talks about this approach as well. So the energy treasure hunts is a way for employees and managers to walk around the gemba together in their work area and identify how energy is being used and use the Kaizen event format as a way to conduct that activity. And this is often areas that people don’t always pay attention to or notice. A lot of times energy and water and these other impacts are happening near the gemba, but they’re not visible. They’re inside the walls or inside the OR above in the ceiling or down underground. And so all we see is pipes or water lines and and and electrical outlets. But we don’t think about the energy and the resources that go into our processes that are doing the value added work. So through this approach we can identify low hanging fruit which is a lot of the behavior based activity. This. And that can. Help. Teams save energy in their area and they’re the ones who know that work and what things can be done easily and. Maybe some of the things that aren’t as easy to implement. So we’re doing in these events is teaching and engaging the employees to understand the electric bill, the energy costs. The usage and the patterns over the year and throughout the week and month. Identify goals. Maybe there’s a company goal for cost reduction or energy reduction and help come up with those opportunities. And it’s a little different than an energy audit where you would have experts come in and look at equipment and say this is outdated or you could replace this. Those are usually capital into. Whereas the improvements that are identified here may not cost much money or no cost at. All. So here’s a simple overview of that approach and you’ll see it looks similar to something you might have already done. The only twist is how we conduct the gamble walks and what we do in that activity so. First thing first is get buy in from leadership. And explain here’s why we’re doing this. And here’s the business case. And this is the opportunity we have. And then find time to organize, schedule or prioritize where you’re going to focus your efforts. Maybe you pick one section of a building, or you work with a team that’s really excited and engaged around this topic. Then we have the actual event and we don’t typically do five days. It might just be two days and it’s not always all day long. So the key is to observe the process during the gembo during value added work happening, but also on the weekends at night during off shifts. Because there’s a lot of wasted energy and you and opportunities when work is not happening. And so it might be a Sunday night and I shift change and on Monday and a shutdown on the weekend. So we look for those times to go do the gamble walks. And then you bring the team back, identify all the opportunities, go through some kind of prioritization activity based on impact and effort. Identify maybe three key actions that that, that can be taken right away. And then continue to maybe implement others if you can get those three done and track that for another thirty 6090 days. So the framework should look very similar to you, just like a traditional Kaizen event and some of the things that were identified in these activities, there’s a whole list here, but I’ll highlight a couple of them. One is listening for air leaks. So if you have a compressed air system and you have leaks in the hoses. That will continue to drive energy usage to keep pressure on the system. And based on the size of the air leaks, you can quantify how much energy you’re wasting. And so when the building is quiet and people are gone, you can hear those air leaks really well. We also notice a lot of times that the temperature settings might not change or adjust whether people are there or not. So one of the projects I worked on that was a very big cost savings. We did a set back program and we’re able to turn the temperature down in the winter months because nobody was there and let the temperature get a little hotter in the summer. And that led to significant savings. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars a year. Also, just providing employees with power strips that allow them to just press 1 button and everything shuts off their monitor, their their fan, their space heater, all those things with one button instead of having them go and click five different things you know trying to make it easy for people to do the right thing. And even looking at stuff like reducing the hot water usage by putting in low flow aerators. There’s a lot of energy that is used to heat up hot water, and so the less we can consume, the more energy savings there is.

Alister Lee

Thanks, Brian. Some really good practical and low cost examples there really helping us tap into the enthusiasm for of many employees that want to make some progress in this area. So we’d like to share the poll results. So you can see on that first question, most people have said very important and that’s alliance with some surveys that have been done recently. One survey of 500 executives with Fortune 101. 1000 companies. 87% of the executives identified sustainability and environmental, social and governance initiatives is very to extremely important to their businesses long term success. So that’s pretty similar to the results that we’ve got here. Bruno, if you can Scroll down a bit so the next question. So the next question really goes from how important to how well are we doing? Are we? Implementing that ambition and you can see here that the the full ambition hasn’t quite been translated into action. Most people have answered actively, working towards the no fall programs although. Pleasing number have said they’re fully committed with formal programs, so that that’s that’s a really good result and it’s actually better than the McKenzie study that I’ve found. And that shows that only 30% of executives believe that sustainability being well integrated into their performance management systems. So perhaps the lean community is doing a. Little bit better. And I suppose that’s really. The strength of Lean isn’t it taking that ambition and actually, yeah. Driving it through to result within our organizations. The final question was was really a question that we really wanted your feedback because this group, with a few others meets regularly and we would like to put on some webinars with some more depth in some of these areas. The ones that scored very high. Were, yeah, the business case was the the. Top 1. So how do you build those business cases? And I suppose the good news, particularly in energy is that the economics and the desire for reduced electricity usage are really giving some pretty good paybacks. My organisations implemented solar recently with a with a very good payback. So that’s the business case. And then the second one there was was value stream mapping. We are looking to to put on some webinars that will dive into these topics in a bit more detail in the first quarter. If you are interested. In attending any such webinars, you are most welcome and it will be ask you for an e-mail and also any other any other topics that you’re interested in. Thank you to all the presenters today some really good examples. And we’re really keen on on seeing this community grow and please come along to our future webinar. Thank you.

Christopher Thompson

OK. OK. Thank you guys. Thank you for sharing about green with lean.

Marcelo Pinto

Thank you.

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