%0 Journal Article
%T Environmentally Lean Production: The Development and Incorporation of an Environmental Impact Index into Value Stream Mapping
%A T. J. Roosen
%A D. J. Pons
%J Journal of Industrial Engineering
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/298103
%X There is a need to include environmental waste alongside other lean wastes. Current concepts of environmental waste focus on the total production of waste from a plant. However waste is generated by individual processes within the production. Therefore focused management of waste requires engineers to know what and where waste is being generated. This is often simply not known with any accuracy. This work offer a solution by developing a method to integrate environmental waste into the lean method of Value Stream Mapping (VSM). Specifically it integrate corporate environmental standards with the VSM process, thereby permitting established lean improvement process to be focused at specific environmental improvement actions. Application of the method is demonstrated in a manufacturing setting, representing a variety of environmental impacts. The deployment is capable of being generalised to any number of environmental factors. It is able to represent a customised waste index for a particular industry. Several ways to represent the multidimensional environmental wastes were explored via industry focus group. The resulting method can be used by production staff to quantify environmental impacts at the level of the individual process and aggregated to report wastes for the whole value stream. 1. Introduction Lean seeks to reduce waste in a production process. One of the more common lean management tools is the use of value stream mapping (VSM). This analyses and represents the time taken to complete a process, with a particular emphasis on time that does not add value to the product, hence nonvalue-added time. VSM is used to reduce task time and subsequently reduce company monetary overheads. VSM focuses on *time* as a wasted consumable. However lean as a whole is concerned with many other types of waste. Consequently organisations that seek to implement lean are typically required to use different lean tools to cover the various waste dimensions of their processes. This invariably means multiple systems, with their own implementation, culture, and reporting processes. There is ongoing interest in developing integrated lean systems that avoid this duplication. One of these areas where better integration is desirable is between the time dimension as covered by VSM and the environmental waste dimension. Environmental waste is only weakly represented in current lean thinking, which tends to simply perceive waste as merely cost of the raw materials or decrements to the productivity of the production system. However, from the environmental perspective, the type
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jie/2013/298103/