Operations Strategy For Lean, Green And Digital Innovations

present era of Industry 4.0 and net zero economy, Sustainable development is considered a universal goal for every business organization. For having sustainable growth, organisations need to continuously adopt lean, green and digital innovations across various processes. Maintaining balance among these measures is a big challenge for most of the organisations today. Despite this tension, some organizations such as 3M, Walmart, GE, IBM, the Hyatt Regency, and Scandic hotels, among others, have been able to turn their environmental concerns into a competitive edge. While these organizations have overcome this traditional trade-off, there is no shared understanding nor strategic guidance on how to achieve sustainable, climate neutral and cost-effective business operations without compromising productivity, the quality of goods and/or services, and the environment. Furthermore, if we consider the three dimensions of sustainability, where social responsibility is added to economic and environmental concerns, a holistic analysis approach seems to be missing. Embracing the three dimensions of sustainability into the upstream process pipelines and to continuously improve operations requires a deep understanding of key internal interactions within the company and key external interactions across the value chain. This understanding, however, still appears to be at a stage of infancy. On the one side, limited perspectives for sustainable development have been considered, on the other, recent studies still identify the prevailing need to enhance our understanding of the link between lean, green and digital innovations and sustainable development.

Among the operational improvement initiatives that seem to have an explicit connection with sustainable growth are those based on lean, green and digital thinking. Fortunately, the existence of lean has offered a way to sustain operations. In lean, a company focuses on producing high quality products in the most efficient and economical way while incorporating less human effort, less inventory, less time to develop products, and less space and yet highly responsive to customer demands. Elimination of material waste directly meets the sustainability objectives. By cutting down unnecessary wastes in all resources, organizations will have more reserves of these resources to be used in the future sustainability. Integrating lean with green and digital innovations may help in achieving many sustainable development goals (SDGs) also along with climate neutrality in operations. There are also several real cases of organizations that have embraced lean along with green and digital innovations in order to maintain competitiveness in the global market.

Introduction and Principle of Lean/ green and digital innovations in operations/supply chains

Concepts of 5S and kaizen, Circular economy, Net Zero economy, Industry 4.0

Applications of Industry 4.0 technologies for lean and climate neutral operations

Process mapping and Value Stream Mapping for improving sustainability

Tools of Lean, Kanban, Batch sizes, Set-up times, Standard work, Jidoka, Heijunka

Secondary tools in lean manufacturing-, Radar chart, Pokayoke, SMED etc.

Lean inventory, Flow, Line balancing, Machine cells, digital tools

Lean Manufacturing through process digitization

Supplier Involvement and Support for lean/green/digital innovations

Quality management tools and six sigma concepts for resilient processes

Hoshin Planning, Continuous Improvement, Waste Elimination

Application of Industry 4.0 technologies for Green supply chains and reverse logistic

Triple bottom line approach and ESG practices for achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs)

Operations strategy for application of Industry 4.0 technologies to ensure climate neutral operations

Developing strategic leadership for adopting lean, green and digital innovations in organisations