Green and Lean Management

This chapter presents the concepts of green supply chain network, green supply chain management, and green logistics. Increasing environmental concerns requires companies to become more responsive to products that either has been returned or that are at the end of their useful lives. Organization’s responsiveness and their reactions toward life cycles of products are critical to achieve sustained success once fluctuations are recurrent and the business environments are turbulent. Life cycles are getting shorter, and effective managing can save large amounts of cash as many materials can be extracted, reused, and redistributed. Alongside this context, this chapter focuses on a general overview toward closed-loop supply chains and offers a generalized optimization model. In addition, incentive approaches for an optimal recovery plan in a closed-loop supply chain are discussed in this chapter.

Lean production has repeatedly been associated with the development of skills, increasing employee participation levels and enhancing the quality of working lives. However, diverse studies also come out against this perspective and instead identify certain limitations to this approach. This article reflects on both the implications lean production holds for the quality of life of workers and its impact within the context of neoliberalism. Opting in favour of a critical view, we present the innovative principles to lean management, segmented into three major topics: production management techniques, supplier networks and human resource management. Subsequently, we make a critical overview of the lean production implications for organising work and the workplace contexts faced by employees. Complementarily, this article also spans the terms under which the neoliberal political-economic system emerged. We conclude that lean production in itself is not the cause of negative impacts but depending on the management style and the way such practices get implemented. This neoliberal contextual framework underpins the focus on the most contested facets of lean production and how this effectively reflects in an intensification of work, boosting control levels, fragmenting and atomising labour and, on the grounds of worker flexibility, ensuring their availability to work in a variety of situations, on low salaries, with limited expectations in terms of workplace security and working conditions, lower levels of collective worker resistance and highly vulnerable to deteriorations in their standards of living.

Supply chain management (SCM) as one of the important research topics plays a major role in performance of organizations/stakeholders operating as the supply chain tiers. Many studies have been published to find the best theory and strategy, which can be applied to each industry or market. SCM is still a developing field and there are still gaps in understanding what its design strategies and boundaries are. There are two major modes of managing supply chain (i) lean supply chain which emphasize supply chain efficiency and (ii) agile supply chains which emphasize supply chain responsiveness and flexibility. This chapter reviews two modes of lean and agile supply chain in Information Technology (IT) distribution field in the emerging markets in the Middle East. The chapter presents key characteristics of lean and agile supply chains in IT industry. It investigates how a suitable supply chain policy can be adopted by IT hardware and services distributors in the Middle East through a case study. Is it a lean supply chain policy which emphasizes efficiency? Or is it an agile supply chain policy which emphasizes responsiveness and flexibility? Or is it an integrated lean-agile policy based on specific activities aimed at specific results? The chapter discusses leanness and agility with a focus on the main activities carried out by IT distributors that include orders processing, professional services, inventory and logistic services. IT industry has been characterized by continuous and rapid market and customer requirements changes. These changes are applicable on all IT products/services such as networking, information security, software, service support, smart phones, IP telephony, CCTV, wireless…etc. Therefore, in IT industry, both manufacturing and service operation should be included in planning processes across its supply chain. The primary data was acquired through specifically designed interviews. The questions were based on the core factors investigated in the literature of operation management, strategic management and marketing related to IT supply chain. The core factors, which are found critical are customer satisfaction, process management, inventory levels, capabilities and services provided, are explored and analyzed through a case study in the Middle East.

Non-profit organizations are constrained by their institutional environment to adopt management models based both on quality certification and on principles of lean thinking. This research analyses the effects of organizational change based on two resources that rationalize organizational management: a quality standard and a software platform. The first resource provides a set of requirements, based on which the quality management system is built. The second resource provides the information/communication technology that provides the infrastructure for a quality management system. In theory, these resources should increase efficiency and stimulate institutional isomorphism. In reality, the consequences of this change process are not only the improvement of overall organizational performance but also increased intra-organizational and inter-organizational heterogeneity and the emergence of organizational paradoxes.

This chapter suggests that while the case for New Public Services rather than New Public Management is well grounded, some expositions of it have neglected the degree to which much can be learned for lean hospital management from the Toyota Production System. It distinguishes inflexible Fordist production based on economies of scale and Taylorist surveillance of performance from Post Fordist lean production based on economies of scope and continuous improvement in work methods. It highlights the contrast between top-down management and transactional leadership in Fordist-Weberian hierarchies with relational coordination through lower-level transformational leadership enhancing base-up learning in the Toyota Production System. It seeks to inform hitherto inconclusive debates on the effectiveness of strategic Human Resource Management by distinguishing institutional, organisational and operational logics and the case for recognising mutual advantage from psychological contract not only between individuals or within groups but also at organisational levels. The chapter gives examples of learning from lean in health reforms in the US and Sweden, contrasts this with not learning from lean in New Public Management in the UK and also draws implications for operationalising lean management within New Public Services paradigm.

The present research paper deals with measuring service quality of State Bank of India on customer satisfaction. The study is based on SERVQUAL dimensions, a diagnostic model developed by Parasuraman et al. (J Retail 64(1):12–40, 1988), which measures customers’ expectations and perceptions of quality of banking services. The research tends to evaluate the significant difference in satisfaction with service quality of banking services through expected and perceived services on SERVQUAL dimensions. Self-administered pre-structured and close-ended questionnaire was used to solicit responses of 300 customers of the leading public sector bank who have also account in any other bank. This present study makes empirical analysis of collected data through SPSS 21 software by different statistical tools like Reliability test for judgment of internal consistency of collected data and paired t test. The study concludes that neither urban nor non-urban branches of the studied bank supersede the other branches in all five dimensions of service quality. It, further, infers that close monitoring of the quality can improve customer retention and their trust on public sector banks.

Modern manufacturing organisations are advancing towards sustainable way of production, appreciating the need to conserve energy and resources. Further economic and societal orientations of sustainability has made the practice more significant. Scope for applying sustainable manufacturing to varied products have been recognised. Consumer electronics involves huge interactions of energy and resources and hence has attracted a lot of attention among researchers globally. It is necessary that sustainable development of different consumer electronic devices is given utmost importance. Manufacture of mobile phones needs to be focused as it is characterised by market dynamism. Hence, development of mobile phones offers considerable challenge to researchers. In this direction, a case study has been discussed regarding sustainable development of mobile phones using environmentally conscious design method. Fuzzy Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a design technique which can be used to create a multi objective model. By applying this method, the interests of customers has been held integral with sustainable design of mobile phones. A more generic model has been created allowing practitioners to easily adapt it in real conditions.

New Public Management (NPM) in health services has proved increasingly controversial. It has been criticised as Weberian in terms of authoritarian hierarchy, Fordist in its obsession with gaining economies of scale and Taylorist in its surveillance of performance criteria. It has assumed a production and output logic derived from manufacturing, whereas both private and public services differ from this. Nonetheless there recently has been a resurgence of interest in what can be learned in terms of lean management in manufacturing, both in terms of economies of scope rather than scale and of multi-tasked and multi-skilled hybrid management at operational levels. This chapter seeks to inform this by distinguishing operational and organisational logics within institutions and by evaluating alternative models of governance of health, including the scope for New Public Services rather than NPM to reinforce social rights and the degree to which replacing a command-and-control model of hospital management with health professionals as ‘hybrid’ managers may enable both social efficiency in service delivery and enhance the wellbeing and fulfilment at work of health service employees.

Employer organizations are always concerned for getting maximum output from their employees. They provide a host of stimuli to their staff so that they fetch sound returns, but the give and take relationship is mediated by many factors. One of those is educational background of employees. Present study is an attempt of understanding the factor with reference to a nationalised bank. Employees were segregated in three groups (tenure, stream and highest degree earned) and their responses to organizational stimuli were measured through well-established scales. Analysis of variance was applied after descriptive analysis of data in order to find out significance of difference in responses. Results of the study indicate significant variance in responses amongst the groups. The study concludes that organizational stimuli should also be designed and manipulated according to the educational background of staff members.

Green and lean management is one of the higher challenges that today’s organizations are facing. However, and in order to better answer to these new challenges and develop new ways of management, organizations need to develop new ways of thinking as well as be more responsible in the society and environment where they are present. Taking into account the importance that the concept of social responsibility assumes in organizations, this present chapter looks to study the way in which corporate social responsibility is implemented in organizations, with a special emphasis to SMEs, in order to develop the green and lean management philosophy.