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    Claus Schafhalter is executive level Management Consultant and owner of Sunogos - Change for the Better


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    Lean Means Sustainability – Step 1 — Define

    By Claus Schafhalter | February 17, 2010

    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

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