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At the same time, some companies were taking on green/lean initiatives with very encouraging results. In 2011, Le Sueur Incorporated (LSI) was one of a handful of companies who participated in a 30-month Minnesota Jobs Skills Partnership program, administered by Enterprise Minnesota, that helped the organizations identify and remedy sources waste through green/lean techniques. In one set of Kaizens, the company identified sufficient waste around compressed air that saved the company $120,000 per year. Savings focused mainly on leaks, but there also examples also mis-use. “There were some big ones,” Zwart remembers. His team discovered, for example, that employees were using compressed air to clean areas underneath large band-saws. “It was a clever idea because they didn’t have to sweep underneath,” he says, “but at what cost? Zwart became a fan of green/ lean initiatives. “It was an extremely valuable experience for us,” he said. It
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many manufacturers could see no connection between lean and green. In fact, there are many who still don’t. “For too long manufacturers viewed “green” and “lean” as two different – even oppositional --approaches, methods, and philosophies,” says John Connelly, director of consulting at Enterprise Minnesota says. Lean was driven to make manufacturing systems go faster and work more efficiently by removing wasted time; green represented add-on processes that were imposed on manufactures at the political/regulatory behest of environmentalists. “Lean is easy to deal with,” Connelly says. “When we remove time, we make the process faster and more cost effective. We improve our price and our margins. We improve quality.” Green, on the other hand, he says, is correlated with expenses that inflate price, suppress margins and possibly slow down completion. Where once manufacturers merely disposed of waste by putting something down a drain or hauling it away, green regulations now required that they had to treat it, or separate it, or flush it with water. The ultimate merging of Green and Lean principles seemed felt incompatible. One reduced costs, the other added expense.
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Companies are discovering how energy savings can add up
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Green: The new ripple of lean
certainly saved more money than any of us would have expected. I thought that was a great lesson learned. And when you are going through the process, you discover that there are other opportunities. He now thinks there may be a half million dollars in potential energy savings throughout his plant. Connelly describes the evolution of green and lean in terms of waves. “Think of a company’s productivity as a pond,” he says. “Poke the center and watch the ripples.” Connelly says, the center ripple – operational efficiency -- began decades ago when manufacturers began to comprehensively analyze their processes to identify the fastest, most efficient ways to make parts, or to make a machines run faster. Operational efficiencies are so ingrained in modern manufacturing, he says, that manufacturers seldom pay attention to it. “It’s inherent in the way they do business.” More than 20 years ago, Connelly says, manufacturers recognized that there’s “a chunk of non value-added ENTERPRISE MINNESOTA AUGUST 2013 29