Lean manufacturing principles are key to the creation of strategic business value in today's competitive market.
The reduction and elimination of waste is common ground for the application of both Lean and Environmental management thinking. The focus on waste in both systems is diverse, but always functional from the standpoint of recovering value from sometimes overlooked or hidden costs and improving performance efficiency.
From the Lean perspective, waste includes overproduction, inventory, transportation, motion, defects, over processing, and waiting.
From the Environmental perspective, waste includes excess materials use, pollution and emission/discharge sources, scrap and non-product output, and hazardous wastes.
The Value Stream Mapis a tool used to create a material and information flow map of a product, process or service. The current state value stream map benchmarks existing conditions and the future state value stream map creates a blueprint to improve the existing conditions in order to transform the system into one that produces a more efficient and value-added product, process or service. Value stream mapping allows participants to "learn to see" the flow of information and materials in a system. This, in turn, leads to the ability to identify both gains and losses to that system and better manage methods to prioritize change and improve performance.
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