Lean Engineering for Global Development

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relevance of Lean Thinking principles implementation around the world, both in industry and services, based on the growing number of published case studies and surveys. A comprehensive review has been conducted on case studies and surveys published between 1990 and 2018 describing Lean Production/Thinking implementations on different countries, classified by year of publication, country and type of company (discrete-industry/process-industry/services) and intervention scope (product/sector). The main findings of this study show that Lean Thinking is a real global (worldwide) and transversal approach to improve organizations’ performance (all types of industries and services). However, several organizations are not yet fully aware of the Lean principles as they do not apply the approach to an entire value stream (i.e. to products or families of products) but only to parts of value streams (i.e. to sectors or areas of the company). The review includes the identification of benefits related to environmental issues that contribute to the sustainability of the organizations.

The constant business pressure to increase operational efficiency promotes Lean. However, studies indicate that Lean has under delivered as a sustainable practice, with few companies developing a “culture of Lean”. This is essentially because practitioners perceive Lean as a set of tools and techniques, instead of adopting a systems approach to addressing issues. Existing approaches to Lean teaching also contribute to the problem; they are not geared towards creating a critical problem-solving mindset which can create systems thinkers. Lean sustainability failures are also exacerbated by Lean’s push for waste reduction, often at the cost of employee well-being. The Sustainable Lean model, developed at the University of Tennessee, balances the inherent struggle between perfect operational and perfect people systems. The balance is created by following four principles: 1. Reduce resource and effort level by strategic problem definition, 2. Align all efforts with system growth and competitiveness, 3. Enhance throughput and capacity, and 4. Enhance employee quality of life. The model inculcates the elements of a critical problem-solving mindset: defining the correct problem, effectively solving the problem, and integrating people requirements into the solution design. This model has become the basis of the systematic development of undergraduate courses, graduate courses, and special programs.

In 2015, the UN defined well-being and decent work/economic growth as two of 17 sustainable development objectives. Nevertheless, the extreme pressure for businesses to be competitive in their markets of choice seems to be having a negative effect on workers’ well-being. In the manufacturing sector, the effective inclusion of Ergonomics in processes and installations has been proven to decrease costs related to disability, extra or overtime hours, medical care and premiums or fines for occurrences. The aim of this work was to review the existing scientific knowledge about the impact of adopting LPS (Lean Production Systems—a model used to increase competitiveness by the creation of more value for customers with fewer resources) in manufacturing companies from the point of view of Ergonomics. It reports, based on the literature reviewed, how the integration of both LPS and Ergonomics principles, from the workstation design phase onwards, can bring benefits to the workers’ welfare and simultaneously potentiate improvements in productivity. This paper also intends to present trends and opportunities for future research in this area, including in the Industry 4.0 field. In the authors’ opinion, this paper is a valuable contribution for practitioners, in manufacturing environments, and researchers.

Current research establishes an interrelation between lean tools and economic performance. However, the synergetic relationship between the lean tools and the triple bottom line approach is not so well explored and understood, making it a relevant research topic. So, this chapter aims to explore how some basic lean tools, such as 5S, Value Stream Mapping (VSM) and Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) can support improving enterprise sustainability concerns. To attain this objective several industrial case studies are explored to illustrate how a set of sustainability outcomes may result from application of some lean tools. Moreover, the potential synergies that can be obtained by lean thinking integrated with other continuous improvement management approaches, such as Six Sigma and Theory of Constraints, and their relationship with sustainability improvement outcomes, will also be here illustrated and discussed.

The application of Clean Production (CP) and Lean Thinking had been explored to reduce the environmental impacts of fish canning processes. An industry-wide survey was conducted to access the current system architecture of the fish canning companies in terms of their environmental practices and lean tools used. By conducting a case study, the CP assessment identified the overall and per operation waste in the fish canning process where material balances showed five (5) main waste streams. A comprehensive set of CP options were proposed to eliminate the waste streams. To solve the production waste while managing the problem of decreasing raw fish supply and increasing tin can prices, lean engineering was conducted. The cleaner production assessment identified the overall and per operation waste in the fish canning process. Major environmental wastes identified include water, tin cans, fish meat, and energy. Moreover, non-value adding wastes surfaced in the lean production assessment are overproduction, waiting, transportation, and inventory. Proposed solutions were analyzed through a cost and benefit analysis. Results show that implementing clean and lean technologies can provide the company good benefits. There is evidence to show that the implementation of clean and lean technologies will greatly reduce the environmental impact of the fish canning industry.

Over the years, companies have been progressing their management strategies and transforming their production systems to cope with the pressing environmental challenges and remain competitive, prosper and meet the market demands. It is no longer enough to only satisfy the demand. The companies face a new transformation on the way of “doing things”, being it the way performance and efficiency is improved, or its relationship with all the stakeholders. Lean manufacturing and eco-efficiency propose a setting for progressively reducing wastes and environmental impacts. Although Lean Production was not developed to directly tackle sustainability issues, its principles and practices convey benefits that could be put, unquestionably, under the umbrella of Green and resulting in synergies known as the Lean-Green link. This chapter aims to present the Business Overall Performance and Sustainability Effectiveness (BOPSE) indicator, which is intended to measure the companies’ Lean-Green compliance. The BOPSE indicator is an integrated metric on companies’ operational performance and sustainability conformity. This indicator exploits the Lean-Green production synergies and is operationalized through an indicator that aggregates and combines Lean production and Green production features. This indicator weaves a number of sustainability issues, spread over its three dimensions, with those encompassed by the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) indicator. Therefore, the BOPSE indicator intends to assess the effectiveness of the businesses grounded on operational performance and sustainability compliance, aiming at identifying both specific limitations and broader opportunities for the global improvement of the companies. Hence, the BOPSE indicator drives companies in their way to meet some of 17 sustainable development goals, namely the 8th—“Decent work and economic growth”, and the 12th—“Responsible consumption and production” sustainable development goals.

Companies are looking for innovative management paradigms to support their cost and time reduction efforts to increase the efficiency of their processes. The Lean paradigm has great relevance in the companies’ need to reduce waste, particularly in manufacturing companies. On the other hand, waste reduction in companies has gained a new dimension not only at the economic level but also at the environmental level with the introduction of the Green paradigm. As such, manufacturing companies have been adopting management practices to reduce the impact of their activities on the environment and/or increase the efficiency of their processes. The present chapter proposes two indexes, the Lean Index and the Green Index, to enable the measurement of the performance of Portuguese manufacturing companies relating to the implementation of Lean and Green practices. The data used to create the Lean and Green indexes were obtained from the implementation of the European Manufacturing Survey 2012 in Portugal. The survey questions related to the implementation of Lean and Green practices are used as variables in the development of the model for the two indexes. For the construction of representative expressions of Lean Index and Green Indexes, factorial analysis was applied for assigning the variables, weights and aggregation.

Traditionally, Textile and Clothing industry (TCI) is an industry that naturally consumes large amounts of natural resources (e.g. natural fibers, natural dyes, water and energy) and release chemicals into the atmosphere, water and soil. Lean Production (LP) is an organizational methodology which main key idea is “doing more with less”. A fundamental difficulty faced by the TCI stakeholders has been in finding out how to implement this methodology efficiently in a sustainable way. Concerned about this problem, a methodology to support the implementation of LP in the TCI, named PESO was developed. This methodology is based on four dimensions: People, Ergonomics, Sustainability and Operational performance (PESO). By including sustainability as a dimension to be taken into account, it is expected to develop and create a natural awareness to consume less. Today in TCI there is a growing concern with sustainability, as shown by the increase in the number of research projects related with this issue. This chapter aims to highlight these developed and developing projects to the light of the Sustainability dimension of the PESO methodology. These were analyzed and discussed to illustrate that though these do not directly address Lean, allied with it could enable sustainability of their production system and processes. This is embedded in the synergy between LP and sustainability, also entitled Lean-Green. By doing this, TCI is on the road to achieve the sustainable development goals, directly, the goal 12, responsible consumption and production.

The world is urbanizing rapidly. In 1950 the urban population stood at 751 million. In 2018, it was 4.2 billion—55% of the world’s population. The Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs predicts that by 2050, 2.5 billion people will have been added to the urban population, for a total of 6.7 billion, representing 68% of the world population. Sustainable development depends increasingly on the successful management of this urban growth (World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision [Key Facts], 2018). A complicating factor is that urban structure is inelastic. Transport corridors, property lines, and buildings are all long-lived objects. Urban development decisions made today will be felt for decades. Lean thinking and lean production constitute a direction in thinking about production. Lean is a focus on value as defined by the customer, not the producer. Lean focuses on reducing waste, rather than maximizing utilization of labor capital. Lean organization is oriented towards shop-floor continuous improvement, rather than radical and risky global redesigns. Both objectives of better value for the new city-dwellers, and reduced waste, seem well suited to the application of lean to the city. The city is an urban form which produces value for the citizens who live there. Central planning in which citizens are managed by experts are sometimes unpopular, and plans are regularly overridden by politics. Funds are never available to meet demand, and therefore wasted funds are a lost opportunity. Cities are being continuously rebuilt and remodeled. But lean is as yet under applied to the production of cities. Applying lean production and management can help move cities past apparently intractable problems due to 19th century central planning and mass production. Lean offers the potential to enable citizens and city managers to direct their energies in more valuable and low-waste directions. This paper explores how lean provides new perspectives by applying each of its five principles to management of city growth and operations.

The need for enterprises to fulfill the call for sustainability responsibilities is evident in all sectors, such as with green production and service processes, concurrent engineering (Felder n.d.), cradle-to-cradle design and triple bottom line strategy, design and performance (McDonough and Braungart in Cradle to cradle: Rethinking the way we make things. North Point, New York, 2002a, b). The Fourth Industrial Revolution, known as Industry 4.0, provides advanced technological assistance, ranging from the Internet of Things to the Digital Twin to Artificial Intelligence, all with hopes of eliminating waste and increasing sustainability of the organization and the planet. These technological innovations are providing a platform for enterprise transformation. However, few of the aspirations of the innovations and disruptors driven by machine and technical systems will be possible in the next decades if the needs of the human systems of organizations are not leveraged in a congruent way through a System of Systems perspective. The past failures of not comprehending the complexities of the human system interfaces with machines and technology provide a clear roadmap as to where organizations cannot afford to travel in the future (Amen et al. in Mechanical engineering 133(12), 2011).