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

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 in order to run reliably data centers need a lot of cooling. Data centers consume lots of energy, on the one side to power computer equipment to generate heat (okay, they consume energy to process data and generate heat as a by-product), and on the other side to cool down the stuff. Our lean trained minds would gear our efforts to reduce the heat in the first place, thus saving energy to drive the computers and saving energy by using less cooling. And in all fairness manufactures and data center owners try to go that route.

Back to topic: An organization dubbed ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) proposed amendments to its efficiency standard for buildings dealing with cooling for data centers. Google, and executives from companies like Microsoft, Nokia, Amazon, and others charge that these standards prescribe how to do cooling (the method), as opposed to setting goals that need to be achieved regardless of the method used. ASHRAE is said to mandate certain equipment. The method (equipment) prescribed may not always be the most efficient or most effective. And the mandate does not accommodate innovations that could be much more environmentally friendly.

Here is my take: As an organization with the power to regulate, set goals and criteria. Let innovative engineers come up with the best methods how to accomplish these goals. Prescribing methods might be good for a few equipment manufacturers, prescribing (reasonable) goals will have a much more powerful impact in reducing power consumption in data centers.

Claus Schafhalter, Management Consultant @ Sunogos

The major source for electric power is coal, about 65% of electricity comes from coal fired power plants. Hydro provides about 20%, and renewable sources provide about 10% in 2009, according to a consultant citing government data.

China’s new target is to produce 15% of their electricity needs using clean technologies. Which triggers huge investments into this area.

Still, there is one nasty surprise when looking at their plan: According to China’s definition clean technologies include solar and wind, but also Nuclear power plants!

Defining it this way means that France with about 80% nuclear power is very clean, while China using a majority of coal fired power might get “cleaner”, but misses clean by a far distance. And in my definition neither France nor China should be called “green”.

Looks like China stays red after all.

Claus Schafhalter, Sunogos

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

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