Lean Sustainability

What is good for our planet can be good for business and its shareholders

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Lean Means Sustainability — Step 4 — Improve

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. […]

Setting Goals Not Methods

In a press release today Google is said to lead the charge against tougher energy effi­ciency stan­dards for data cen­ters. Google? Is this not the com­pany tout­ing green ini­tia­tives and try­ing to not be evil? It is worth to dig a lit­tle deeper into this issue. Data cen­ters house tons of heat pro­duc­ing com­puter equip­ment, and […]

Red China Turns Green?

China’s com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment announced in its lat­est 10-year plan a tar­get to pro­duce 15% of the country’s energy demand using “clean” tech­nolo­gies. As China is grow­ing rapidly energy con­sump­tion is believed to increase sub­stan­tially. The major source for elec­tric power is coal, about 65% of elec­tric­ity comes from coal fired power plants. Hydro pro­vides about […]

Lean Means Sustainability – Step 2 – Measure

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 […]

Lean Means Sustainability – Step 1 — Define

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. […]