LEANing on ASEAN

I got the chance to speak with Mr. John Hamalian, the Southeast Asia representative for the Lean Global Network, about his thoughts on LEAN concepts and their effect on sustainability and circularity in ASEAN organisations.

We must consider ideas from a variety of perspectives in order to meet the challenge of the sustainability pivot. Here's a chance to learn how LEAN can support our efforts to advance the fight against climate change.

1. How can LEAN philosophies be used to create a culture of sustainability within ASEAN corporations?

Much of the Sustainability dialogue and practices in the world currently focus on reporting, carbon calculation, government regulations, compliance, and similar themes.?While these are important topics, they may not directly lead to the real actions that are desperately needed for organisations to combat global warming and other critical issues facing the world.?This is where I believe ‘Lean’ can help.

Lean Thinking has been around for a few decades and is familiar to many organisations at a basic level, but its huge potential to help with the Sustainability movement is only now being tapped.?At its core, Lean is about the relentless pursuit of increasing Value and eliminating Waste through people engagement, problem-solving, and continuous innovation.?‘Waste’ can include issues vital to achieving a sustainable, circular economy, such as energy usage, unused food and income inequity.?My Lean sensei used to take out a fat marker on any documents I prepared for him that had big swathes of unused space on them, highlighting the blank areas in a screamingly thick red colour.?I used to think of him as quite crazy for focusing on such a seemingly trivial issue, and only years later did I realised he was teaching me about understanding the ‘Mottainai!’ way, perhaps best translated as ‘wastefulness’ and in particular the expression of personal regret in behaving so.?‘Mottainai’ very much captures the spirit of Lean Thinking, and Lean’s almost obsessional focus on waste elimination makes it a critical part of building a sustainability culture in an organisation.

Also, and to debunk a common myth that Lean is somehow all about Manufacturing, the scope of Lean entails the entire array of an organisation’s activities from end to end, including Strategy, Product/Process Design and Development, Fulfilment, Customer Service, Functional Support and Stakeholder Management; making it ideal as an overarching management philosophy, operating model, and common ‘language’ throughout the entire organisation.?So, at a very fundamental level, Lean’s obsessive focus on Stakeholder Value, People and Waste Elimination makes it a powerful enabler on the journey of creating a Culture of Sustainability in organisations, whether in the private, public, or people sectors.

2. What are some practical examples of how LEAN tools and techniques can be applied to reduce waste and increase efficiency in sustainable ways?

Although the connections between Lean Thinking and Sustainability are relatively new, already we have cases where Lean techniques can be used to decrease energy usage, reduce food wastage, lower carbon emissions, minimise material usage, etc. for both financial gain and sustainability progress.?Benefits can also include improved competitiveness, employee morale, and brand image, but these are often difficult to measure.?"Lean and Green"—the act of using Lean Thinking for environmental sustainability—entails essentially the refocusing of existing Lean practices towards reducing environmental impacts, including Green Hoshin, Green Lean Product/Service Design, Green Value Stream Design, Green Lean Process Innovation, Green Kaizen, and others, and these are practices that companies can relatively easily adopt to help meet their sustainability goals.?I’ll share a few examples.

A General Electric ‘Green Kaizen’ activity (GE calls these ‘Treasure Hunts’) identified 700k metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions savings, which also entailed doing a ‘Gemba Walk’ or actually going to the front line to see problems and opportunities rather than relying on reports and data.?One particularly interesting form of a "Green Gemba Walk" (green, but perhaps not very clean!) is a "Dumpster Dive," or the act of physically sifting through solid waste streams to understand exactly what is being wasted and then trace back to its source.?Solar cell and panel maker Sunpower did a Dumpster Dive while striving for zero-waste-to-landfill certification.?It was found that the bulk of the residue came from their cafeteria, about 115 kg of food waste per day, leading them to compost the food waste on their own land.?Now they grow their own vegetables for the cafeteria, including lettuce and radishes, using their own solar panels (some with minor cosmetic defects but fully functional) to power the composter!

Lean "Value Stream Design" entails the rethinking of the end-to-end flow of work involved in the design, development, and delivery of products, services, and solutions.?This approach utilises a core Lean technique known as Value Stream Mapping (VSM), which visualises the flow of a relevant Value Stream so that a collaborative team can brainstorm innovative ways to streamline it.?In one case, a ‘Green VSM’ helped highlight the fact that 90 kilograms of a resource were used to make a product, when in fact only 50 kilograms were needed!

‘5S’, or the Lean approach to rethinking and redesigning workspaces for maximum user and customer effectiveness, can often lead to reductions in the human effort as well as the resources needed.?A fuel systems company applied ‘Green 5S’ techniques to its fleet of service vehicles, prioritising which items added the most value for the service technicians and removing the rest, while also making the space easier to use for the users.?This reduced the weight of each vehicle by 140 kg, resulting in significant fuel savings as well as carbon emissions (for every 100-kg reduction, fuel consumption decreases by about 0.4 L/100 km).

I believe these examples show that forward-thinking, long-term-oriented, and innovative organisations, powered by Lean Thinking, can turn ESG risks into new opportunities, positioning themselves for sustainable success by saving money as well as saving the environment as the world shifts to a Circular, Net-Zero Economy.?

3. Can you share any case studies of ASEAN corporations that have successfully implemented LEAN thinking to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs)?

Lean’s focus on the process, rather than just the result, and improving it through significantly re-thinking and re-designing work can be a big contribution to the Green Movement.?One simple example of this in ASEAN was at a Singapore food caterer, where their facility to store and pick catering materials (trays, burners, utensils, etc.) for customer orders was bulging at the seams, and the CEO already had plans to expand the warehouse capacity by shifting to a larger building.?

With some simple lean techniques such as careful observation, spaghetti analysis and 5S, the work was rethought and the layout was redesigned.?Not only did the current space now meet all the requirements (they actually found they had extra space!), it prevented the relocation of the facility to a place farther from their central kitchen, which would have been a larger space, saving utility and petrol usage for a net lower carbon footprint.?This can be seen as helping achieve SDG 13 (Climate Action).?Also, there were improvements made in the kitchen area in terms of workspace design, flow of work, and food preparation practices that would have reduced food waste, though we do not have hard data on that.?Improvements such as this can be integral to helping achieve SDG 12 (Responsible Production and Consumption).?And, as often happens in a Lean transformation, the work was made easier and safer for the staff, resulting in benefits that can be associated with SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth).?Speaking of ASEAN, since it is heavy in the F&B, Hospitality and Tourism sectors, Lean has a huge potential to assist the region in meeting the SDG 13 goal in particular, as well as others.

4. How can LEAN thinking be used to foster collaboration and partnerships with stakeholders, such as local communities and NGOs, to promote sustainable practices?

One of the two pillars of the Lean way of managing and leading, which was first applied at Toyota and later absorbed into the ideas of Lean Thinking, is Respect.?The term originally referred to ‘Respect for People’, but I believe that over the years Toyota has demonstrated an expansion of the interpretation of this concept, and now we can consider it to be ‘Respect for People, Communities, Society and the Planet’.?Toyota has always placed a significant emphasis on working with parties outside its own company, long before ‘stakeholder engagement’ became a thing.?This is not just because the idea of working with suppliers, local communities, etc. seems altruistic; it also achieves results.?This thought pattern may stem from Systems Thinking, a core foundation of Lean, and in this instance is an acknowledgement that a company is just one part of a larger system; and that instead of aiming for 'efficiency’ (optimisation of one point), the organisation should aim for ‘effectiveness’ (optimisation of the whole), which in the long term is usually better for everyone.?

So an essential component of Lean Thinking is Stakeholder Management, a point that was brought up even in the first book that mentioned ‘Lean’, and within that, a fundamental respect for suppliers, partners, customers, etc., as they are all seen as part of the broader ‘value stream’ of the design, development, delivery, and usage of products and services.?In fact, Lean has a particular technique known as an ‘Extended Value Stream’ which is used to understand and improve the entire flow of value-producing activities from end to end, including beyond the organisation itself and into either or both upstream and downstream activities as well.?By using this method, an entire food chain was mapped, from raw materials to the retail shelf.?Among other things, this led to the identification of around 15,000 tons of CO2 and 40,000 m3 of water savings.?

5. How can LEAN tools and techniques be used to measure and track the environmental impact of a company's operations and products?

One of the less-known but most powerful techniques in Lean is the Daily Management System, or the practice of measuring, tracking and managing performance frequently and at every level of an organisation, not just the top and middle.?For example, a team of coffee shop staff may measure the amount of coffee grinds they use, with the intent of finding ways to reduce wastage through innovation; or a team of workers may measure the number of gloves they use on a regular basis, with the intent of finding ways to reduce the usage rate.?

Leadership is expected to visit the work areas on a regular basis (daily or weekly depending on the nature of the work) with the purpose of coaching staff on their problem-solving approaches, challenging them to be innovative and supporting them with anything needed for success.?This simple Lean Daily Management System approach is part of the oft-hidden magic behind creating a sustainable culture of teamwork, trust, problem-solving, continuous improvement and zero waste.

6. What role can LEAN thinking play and the significance of Human-Centred Design in promoting a circular economy and reducing waste?

With ‘Respect for People’ as one of the core beliefs in the Lean approach to thinking and working, Lean Thinking goes far beyond hard savings and process improvement tools and indeed is part of a holistic, people-centric management philosophy that emphasises building a culture of self-perpetuating improvement by respecting the ideas and contributions of people at every level and in every part of society.?

Embedded into Lean is also a deep, profound respect for work itself, and with that the people who perform the work, which manifests itself as an intense focus on how staff, customers, patients, citizens etc actually do their work and use things.?Coupled with tools from the ‘designers toolkit’ in Human-Centred Design, in particular the superb Empathy tools from that discipline, Lean Thinking can play an essential role in promoting a circular economy and as we have already seen, eliminating waste.?In fact, I would say that Lean Thinking and Design Thinking can be used together as a powerful combination, and are both part of 4 or 5 ‘essential thinking’ modes that I consider to be crucial to master for any person or organisation who wants to successfully achieve Sustainability.

7. If you are part of an ASEAN intergovernmental committee what would be the key message/motivation for the use of LEAN in the region?

My message for anyone who is serious about actually achieving sustainability would be that Lean may be the most practical, relevant and implementable of all the management and innovation approaches in the world today.?Its relentless focus on increasing value and reducing waste through People, Innovation, Employee Involvement, Stakeholder Engagement, First-Hand Observation, Listening, Self-Responsibility, Critical Thinking, Simplicity, Flexibility and Systems Thinking makes it uniquely equipped to meet the challenges of today.?The other advantage of Lean is that it can be applied effectively in all three sectors, Public, Private and People, and indeed can be an integral ‘connective tissue’ in Tri-Sector Cooperation by providing a common source of design, collaboration and operating principles.

Lean Thinking, coupled with the technical know-how and domain experience of the Sustainability Community, can be a powerful One-Two Punch to tackle the problems associated with the transition to a socially just, economically equitable and environmentally sustainable world.?

Thank you, John, for your contribution to the sustainability knowledge base.

If you would like to find out more about LEAN Global Network, do click on the link below:

https://leanglobal.org/john-s-hamalian/