Integrated Assessment of ‘Green-Lean’ Production

Abstract

Green Production has becoming increasingly important because of the growing need for sustainable development. Lean Production is one the most influential concepts in contemporary industrial management. The focus of Lean Production has been waste elimination and streamlining operations. Therefore, it is natural to seek alternatives for balancing or synergizing productivity gains with environmental friendliness by combining Green and Lean initiatives. However, Green and Lean practices may result in negative side effects. Such cases are mostly explained by dysfunctional assessments of effects. Sometimes, companies center on the positive effects, but hide or externalize negative trade-offs. Therefore, consistent assessment is critical to secure the achievement of Green and Lean objectives. An assessment has to consider all vital interdependencies between various effects. When enforced by law, it should respect all limitations and incentives set by regulators. To address these issues, an approach to integrated assessment of Green-Lean Production was conceptualized. Two fundamental strategic perspectives are considered for assessment: the product and operations views.

Knowledge building about performance evaluation in lean production

“…Taking advantage of the prior development of lean production, environmental management and performance evaluation, practitioners and researchers evaluate lean green practices and performance, and develop integrated (green and lean) performance measurement systems. As examples of this new context we can mention new research themes such as lean and green benchmarking (Verrier et al , 2014), lean and green practices and performance assessment (Zhan et al , 2016; Strzelczak, 2017; Habidin et al , 2018), lean and green maturity model (Verrier et al , 2016), lean sustainable performance evaluation (Ruben et al , 2017) and integrated performance measurement framework (Sangwa and Sangwan, 2018). This period is very consistent with the recommendations of Neely et al (1995) regarding the identification of individual performance measures and their performance measure bundles, but presents less strategic alignment than the previous period to what Bourne et al (2000) and Nudurupati et al (2011) recommended, probably because this change is recent and researchers had to take a step back to better understand the breadth of this integration through surveys.…”

“…With growing environmental concerns and the emergence of sustainable business, some researchers and practitioners have broadened the pure lean approach to “Lean-Green”, promoting integrated vision and leveraging gains in waste reduction. The main themes covered by the “Lean-Green” approach are benchmarking (Verrier et al , 2014; Ramos et al , 2018), the maturity model (Verrier et al , 2016) and practices and performance assessment (Zhan et al , 2016; Strzelczak, 2017; Habidin et al , 2018). Verrier et al (2014) proposed an approach that added environmental and social dimensions to the consideration of economic earnings received through lean actions, analysing the literature and the practices of Alsatian industrial companies in order to assess how lean and green actions could be enhanced when used together.…”

A Method to Assess Social and Human Factors of Production Innovations

“…By considering a given context the above items can be chosen accordingly. Apart of consistency, specific fits are crucial to avoid dysfunctional assessments [21]: (i) complexity fit: reflects whether the setting of assessment adequately considers the trade-offs and other critical interdependencies of factors and effects; (ii) measurement fit: consistency of applied metrics with the measured characteristics; (iii) aggregation-granularity dilemma: too detailed assessments and too aggregated measures increase the assessment effort and the difficulty to address complexities, while using too focused measures reduces diagnostic power and directing function of the assessment; (iv) informational fit: conformance with the support from legacy ICT systems; (v) methodical fit: conformance of assessment with the legacy systems and processes of manage and control.…”