Lean and sustainability

Eight practices to put more green into lean

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FeaturesMay 25, 2020
John S. Hamalian
FEATURE – The planet is warming at an unsustainable rate, pollution is increasing, wildlife populations and arable land areas have plummeted, and our oceans are filling with plastic. Can Lean Thinking help?

What sustainability looks like

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    string(1608) "Lean thinking may have been born in Toyota in the 1950s and 1960s, but it wasn’t until after the year 2000 that a few hospitals began to explore its application to the healthcare industry (lean healthcare). These pioneering organizations came together to share their stories at the first Global Lean Healthcare Summit in the UK in 2007, which in turn triggered many more experiments around the world. Since then, interest has kept growing.

Some fifteen years on, we have hundreds of examples to learn from, from clinics and departments through to entire hospitals and even whole hospital systems. Not all early experiments succeeded, and we are still a long way from making lean a widely recognized way of working across the industry.
Healthcare providers around the world still face huge challenges, as ageing populations and unhealthy lifestyles boost the demand for healthcare faster than the growth of incomes and tax revenues from the middle classes. At the same time, the quality of care has not improved as much as the quality of other services in the economy, which is why more and more healthcare organizations are turning to lean.

Historically, lean healthcare ideas have been applied in large hospitals, but in the past few years we have started to see the philosophy adopted in earnest in many smaller organizations following a do-it-yourself approach that has generated many positive benefits. An impressive example is the Consorci Sanitari del Garraf near Barcelona."
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Opinion piecesJun 28, 2019
Oriol Cuatrecasas, Cristina Fontcuberta and Néstor Gavilan
OPINION – The team at Instituto Lean Management in Barcelona comments on recent news from the Catalan healthcare sector and reflects on lean sustainability.
lean mining Laura Mottola

Why the mining industry desperately needs lean thinking

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FeaturesMay 7, 2018
Laura Mottola
FEATURE – Lean thinking is still largely absent from the mining industry. The author explains the great opportunities that lie ahead for an industry with a huge potential to improve.
The Green IT Club kaizen

Meet the club experimenting with IT and sustainability

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FeaturesMar 22, 2018
Catherine Chabiron
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – This month, the author meets a group of business leaders consistently breaking new ground in their exploration of the relationship between IT and sustainability by using a kaizen-like approach.
lean in myanmar

Lean project boosts sustainable development in Myanmar

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FeaturesSep 1, 2016
Monica Rossi & Rossella Luglietti & Giulia Donnici & Moung Kee Aung
FEATURE – A group of Italian researchers and professionals partnered with a NGO to prove how lean thinking can pave the way for the competitiveness and sustainable development of SMEs in Myanmar. Is this a new model for the developing world?
circular economy and lean

Lean makes our economy more responsible – the SunPower story

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    string(1594) "Manufacturing is where the lean movement originated from. For their MIT research in the late 1980s (which resulted in the 1990 seminal book The Machine the Changed the World), Jim Womack and Dan Jones identified a set of principles and techniques that made Japanese carmakers far more productive than their Western competitors.

The superiority of the Toyota Production System is now a recognized fact (Toyota has been profitable every year but one, for half a century), which means that today most manufacturing organizations around the world practice lean manufacturing thinking to some extent. The prevalence of this alternative way of thinking and managing in the manufacturing sector often generates confusion in other industries, in which people’s first reaction to improvement attempts is the now proverbial “We don’t make cars. Lean is a manufacturing thing.”

When applied to manufacturing, lean tools like heijunka, SMED or Kanban cards allow for the optimization of production processes and the systematic elimination of waste (in its three incarnations of muda, muri and mura – respectively, non-value-adding work, overburden and unevenness). These happen by implementing the fundamental lean principles of pull and flow. However, it has now been proved that the principles characterizing lean manufacturing are universally applicable. They work in any sector and they apply to any kind of work – even though at times they require some adjustment."
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FeaturesMay 17, 2016
Marty Neese
FEATURE – The experience of solar company SunPower shows how, by marrying the concept of circular economy, lean principles can help us to transform our habits and save our planet.
womack paris agreement climate lean

Lean management to make the Paris Agreement on climate work

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Lean ManagementJan 26, 2016
Jim Womack
WOMACK'S YOKOTEN – Last month nations signed a greenhouse gas emissions deal – on paper, an insurance policy against climate change. But if action is to follow promises, the cost of the insurance premium, as perceived by voters and governments, must be lowered. Lean thinking can help.
sustainable lean LEI polska

What makes lean sustainable? Value creation and PDCA

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FeaturesSep 7, 2015
Malgorzata Jakubik & Robert Kagan
FEATURE ARTICLE – For the last article of their series, the authors ask themselves the ultimate question: who wins at lean, and who loses? What makes change sustainable? Turns out, it’s all about the fundamentals.