Green Manufacturing is a key component to Sustainability

Being ‘green’ is a subset of a much broader world of supply chain sustainability and social responsibility. In the purest sense, sustainability incorporates a multitude of supply chain considerations such as fair labor   practices, energy and resource conservation, human rights, and community responsibility.

 

While companies define their Corporate Social Responsibility mission, CEOs struggle to identify the right ‘green’ initiatives in which to invest time and money.  Opportunities for improvement exist in every function within an organization. 

How do you know where to focus in order to maximize the benefit to your profit, to your stakeholders and to the planet?

Thinking Lean and Green 

Lean saves money. Green saves money.  It is time to integrate your thinking on lean and green as both target waste elimination.

Energy and environmental issues are rapidly growing in awareness as businesses cope with the rising costs of energy and the increasing sensitivity to environmental issues and the costs of sustaining operations as both a profit-making enterprise and a good corporate citizen in society at large.  We've crossed the tipping point where environmental stewardship is perceived as both a corporate responsibility and a potentially performance-enhancing strategy. 

Focusing on energy and environmental issues together on a value stream basis allows an organization to better understand the potential savings and potential impact of their value streams in terms of energy use, carbon emission equivalents and environmental impact.  The synergy between the lean emphasis on eliminating waste when focused on energy and environmental concerns can lead to breakthrough results including financial performance gains.  In fact, incorporating energy and non-product inputs and outputs into standard value stream mapping increases awareness of these issues and allows waste to be identified so that it can be targeted for improvement.  The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) promotes value stream mapping and kaizens as excellent tools to focus attention and action on energy and environmental impact.

Emerging "cap and trade" markets for carbon offsets and environmental regulatory reporting requirements increase the necessity to focus on sustainability as an integrated element for the operations of a value stream.  

How VSEM Helps with Sustainability

Based on the underlying value stream model, Input Resources allow you to identify and classify resources required for each process or the value stream as whole, estimate the costs of the resource and understand where those costs are incurred.  Productive, non-productive and idle resources are identified and reported. 

Resources include electricity, natural gas, oil, water, solvents, or any required material or energy used by the value stream that is not in the bill of materials.  Resources may be assigned at the value stream level such as propane for forklifts or at each process such as fuel for a furnance.

Similarly, Non-product Outputs allows you to account for the Input Resources that are not consumed in to the finished product.  These may be in the form of waste water, depleted chemicals or cleaning solvents, air particulates, hazardous materials, etc.  Disposal costs associated with environmental impacts allow you to plan for and track the financial costs of continuing operations.

Combining Input Resources and Non-product Outputs together in a single view yields a focus on sustainability not just for the value stream but for the impact on the environment.  This sets the base for tracking Carbon Emissions ultimately in support of carbon offsets under the emerging “cap and trade” system. 

Business decisions can now include environmental impacts together with people and profit.

Unlimited Resource types and Non-product Outputs with associated process rates and costs per unit allow you to plan for environmental stewardship in your value streams.  These features include support for extended "what if" scenarios allowing you to develop alternate future states that may have very different "green" impacts.  This supports the more holistic considerations that lead to environmentally responsible business decisions considering energy and water use and environmental impact as well as value stream profitability. 

Click here for more information on VSEM support for Carbon Footprint

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