In ear­lier posts I wrote about “Define”, “Mea­sure” and “Analyze” as part of Lean Six Sigma’s DMAIC cycle. The example I used in these previous posts showed that our office is not energy efficient, and we also analyzed where and why. Remember, the most important results of the Analysis phase are well determined problem causes.

Within the Improve phase, creativity techniques are used to find and evaluate ideas to address the problems.  Let’s assume one of the issues we want to tackle is the waste of energy due to offices that are heated or cooled, even when they are not occupied. Ideas to improve might be installation of occupancy sensors (motion sensors) that turn off heating or A/C when no one is there.  Or maybe a connection to the light switch — no light, then no heating or cooling. A different approach could be to control temperature based on daytime, weekend and holidays. And there maybe many more ways to reduce energy (more efficient heating / cooling system, better insulation, etc.).

Once we have collected ideas, we need to evaluate these ideas against benefits, cost, risk, time to implement, and other criteria suitable for our situation. We select the best improvement ideas, and — using plain old project management tools — implement the improvements.

Some advice: Especially if your organization is new to structured improvement processes, it is better to concentrate on solutions that can be implemented fast using small (or no) investment money. These solutions should show positive results very soon, and therefore motivate employees to go along, prepare for future changes, and convince management that the solutions are worth while.

Lean Six Sigma improvements should be seen as part of a targeted continuous improvement process, and the really successful organizations are in for the long haul. They set an overall goal, and break this goal down into smaller targets to be accomplished along the way.

But how do we know if our improvement efforts are successful? Lean Six Sigma has the answer in Step 5 — Control, which I will describe in a following post.

Claus Schafhalter, Management Consultant @ Sunogos

I am still concerned about what’s going on with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Previous estimates were that 800,000l oil spill into the sea every day. Some scientists come to the conclusion that it is more likely to be 10 times more! It seems to be consensus that right now nobody knows exactly how much oils streams into the Gulf.

This is what  BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles had to say:

“This data is not easy to capture,” Suttles said. “We actually have to assign some of our technicians to gather that data.”

Yes, clearly someone has to look at this. Does it matter how much oil is leaked?

Well, you can’t control what you can’t measure. This begs the following question:  If BP cannot measure the spill, how do they think they will be able to stop the spill?

Claus Schafhalter, Management Consultant @ Sunogos

In earlier posts I wrote about “Define” and “Measure” as part of Six Sigma’s DMAIC cycle. Step 3 is “Analyze”, the “A” in DMAIC. The intend of this step is to understand what causes the problem defined in step 1 – “Define”. Let’s assume we characterized our problem that we spend too much energy in an office context and believe that we can use energy more efficiently.

There are many lean tools to analyze our problem further, like several methodologies for root cause analysis, process maps for visualization, or the 5 Whys analysis to get past surface level answers to our problem. Usually I advise my clients to use a some kind of brainstorming methodology to gather many potential root causes, group potential root causes into bundles of similar ideas, and do an evaluation regarding probability, changeability and impact of root causes if addressed.

There will be many causes for energy inefficiencies in our example, starting from not being able to turn down heating or AC in unoccupied offices to a copy machine that is set up incorrectly and therefore does not go into sleep or stand-by mode during off hours.

Once we’ve developed our Ishikawa, Pareto or Tree diagram, we select good candidates that would address our problem and do further steps to confirm that we are working on the right issues and addressing them would make us more energy efficient.

The methodology outlined above and described in many publications about lean management can be applied to many different problems, small or large. I saw that even big manufacturing plants where management thinks that they are highly efficient can benefit significantly redoing the Analyze phase on a regular basis. However, they have to ensure to bring fresh thinkers to the table, otherwise each new exercise is just a sad rehash of the ones done before.

Alright, now we know why our office is not energy efficient enough. The next step — “Improve” will be subject of another post.

Claus Schafhalter. Management Consultant with Sunogos Inc.

Earlier I wrote how to start a lean sustainability initiative by defining objectives and framework. Step 2 of the DMAIC cycle is “Measure”.

It sounds obvious that we need to know where we are before we know in which direction we need to go. By measuring we are trying to understand where we are, and once we measure our environmental impact we might run into some surprises.

For example, let’s establish the current electricity consumption of an office building. Usually it should be easy to get electricity usage information from the utility and add them up for the building. However, data to generate a usage pattern over a year (i.e. summer versus winter), or over a day (consumption at midnight is usually significantly different than at noon time) can sometimes be just not available. In another example, measuring the total energy input into a production facility and following the energy stream throughout the production process can in itself be a project step that takes weeks to accomplish.

Here is the beef, though: When a human being starts to measure something that is at least somewhat interesting, the human being also starts to think about possibilities to control.

One of my clients looked at the electric usage pattern over a typical weekday and compared many days. It was interesting to see that the facility always used a certain significant amount of electricity, even at minimum times (2AM to 4AM in this example).  The team was now curious to see what the sourc of this energy demand is. After compiling a list of energy users potentially running during minimum times, they measured consumption using standard devices like Kill-A-Watt and added consumption up. They found more than they expected, like lights that consumed more energy than necessary, a big copier machine that was defect and refused to go into stand-by mode, and some electric heaters used to heat some basement storage rooms which operators forgot to turn off when they left the building.

It is a fact that it can be very difficult to measure sustainability impacts of more complex systems. However it is better to start to measure now – even with limited scope and accuracy – than to not measure at all.

Claus Schafhalter, Sunogos

In 2003 scientists proposed ideas for green engineering. Based on work done to articulate principles for green chemistry, Anastas and Zimmermann developed principles for “Green Engineering”.

I do like the pragmatic approach inherent in these principles. I think it is worth to look at these principles:

12 Priciples For Green Engineering:

1. Inherent Rather Than Circumstantial
   Designers need to strive to ensure that all materials and energy inputs and outputs are as inherently nonhazardous as possible.
2. Prevention Instead of Treatment
   It is better to prevent waste than to treat or clean up waste after it is formed.
3. Design for Separation
   Separation and purification operations should be designed to minimize energy consumption and materials use.
4. Maximize Efficiency
   Products, processes, and systems should be designed to maximize mass, energy, space, and time efficiency.
5. Output-Pulled Versus Input-Pushed
   Products, processes, and systems should be “output pulled” rather than “input pushed” through the use of energy and materials.
6. Conserve Complexity
   Embedded entropy and complexity must be viewed as an investment when making design choices on recycle, reuse, or beneficial disposition.
7. Durability Rather Than Immortality
   Targeted durability, not immortality, should be a design goal.
8. Meet Need, Minimize Excess
   Design for unnecessary capacity or capability (e.g., “one size fits all”) solutions should be considered a design flaw.
9. Minimize Material Diversity
   Material diversity in multicomponent products should be minimized to promote disassembly and value retention.
10. Integrate Material and Energy Flows
    Design of products, processes, and systems must include integration and interconnectivity with available energy and materials flows.
11. Design for Commercial “Afterlife“
    Products, processes, and systems should be designed for performance in a commercial “afterlife.”
12. Renewable Rather Than Depleting
    Material and energy inputs should be renewable rather than depleting.

If you are in the market to buy a new product, it is quite interesting to look at a product through the green engineering lens. While many design features are hard to evaluate just looking at a product, some can be seen quite easily and are able to influence purchasing decisions. So, how does the iPhone fare, the Prius, or the simmer pan available at Williams-Sonoma?

Still, the sarcastic side in me needs to mention that certain products land on the wrong side of principle #7 “Durability rather than immortality”. I got too many products lately that stop to function way too soon. A little bit more “immortality” would be appreciated!

Increasing efficiency is the name of the game. The objective is to reduce waste and get more value into the product. Thus improving profits and decreasing environmental impacts.

Lean Management, Six Sigma and other management philosophies offer tools to get sustainability efforts right. For instance, Six Sigma offers DMAIC – Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control.

Step 1 — Define: To get a sustainability initiative started management needs to define the objective and the framework, preferably as part of the business strategy. Let’s assume an executive team decides to concentrate sustainability efforts first on one area: Reduction of energy used. The sustainability officer is asked to come up with an initial plan to reduce energy usage substantially.

He now has to define the object of improvements, for the sake of our example we assume there are two areas to look at: Energy used in the manufacturing and delivery operations, and energy used in the administrative functions.

I personally recommend to set an early initial target in this phase of an initiative. The initial target could be to reduce energy consumption by 10% within 12 months. And framework wise it is defined that investments into energy reduction need a pay off of less than 18 months.

Yeah, I know, there are a lot of assumptions and not a lot of hard facts. Is a reduction of 10% feasible? Can it be achieved under the time constraints and investment constraints given? Well, failure is possible, but I do believe that starting targeted activities early is better than analyzing without aim.

So here we go, the first step is done. On the strategic level our example company set the goal to get more sustainable by reducing energy consumption. On the operational level initial objectives for the first 12 months are defined.

Are we up to a good start?

Claus Schafhalter, Sunogos

Some of my consulting colleagues want to sell you a green strategy. Your organization needs to get more environmentally friendly, so they say, and the first step is developing a green strategy.

Well, not so. See, if you develop another strategy targeting green challenges how will it fit into your overall business strategy? Or will your IT strategy go in lock-step with your green strategy?

No, your organization needs an adequate overall strategy. Green aspects need to be an integral part of this strategy, not a separate entity. If you can’t do that, your green strategy will be an isolated island and you will fail.

But how to start? Well, a statement like “we will reduce our energy consumption as measured per unit of output significantly over 3 years” could be a good start to be part of your strategy. Of course you should quantify what “significantly” means as part of your strategy metrics. One of my clients broke it down to reduce electricity consumption in two of their manufacturing plants by 30% per output unit, while setting a target of 15% for their administrative offices. And they assigned a responsible officer to initiate and oversee activities to meet the goals.

And the beauty is that saving energy also means to save money. Especially if you are just now starting to focus more on energy efficiency, the first 20% of savings are the simplest and usually do not need a lot of capital investments. Just start to track where your energy is used, and find out where it is wasted.

Sounds familiar? Yes it does. Reducing waste is a main principle of lean management.