The Marriage of Lean and Eco-Friendly Design

The five lean principles impact a facility’s design from the initial phase to the project’s completion. These lean principles are:

1. Value: Customers determine their own definition of value for their plant layout.
2. Value stream mapping: This identifies the fundamental tasks, steps, and processes that can be optimized to enhance the plant’s eco-friendly value.
3. Create flow: The plant layout and design should facilitate a smooth flow of goods and personnel to maximize production time while keeping the carbon footprint at a minimum.
4. Establish pull: The facility design should support just-in-time (JIT) production to avoid overstocking or understocking.
5. Continuous improvement: The facility design should naturally inspire teams to continually get better at their jobs by seeking ways to optimize their processes.

Significance of Eco-Friendly Facility Design

Given that 27% of American consumers are believed to be supporters or members of the most eco-conscious group in society, Planet Protectors, modern manufacturing companies must embrace an eco-friendly facility design. The need for an eco-friendly plant layout is not only a product of consumer demand but also a positive response to the ravaging environmental impact of traditional plant operations.

The value of an environmentally sustainable plant layout goes beyond contributing to the green economy. A lean plant layout influences four levels of a company’s sustainability:

• Environmental sustainability: A lean plant layout helps reduce a plant’s environmental pollution.
• Social sustainability: A lean plant layout promotes overall employee well-being.
• Governance sustainability: A lean plant layout facilitates compliance with standard industry regulations.
• Economic sustainability: A lean plant layout boosts the company’s profitability by increasing its operational efficiency and reducing waste.

The impact of a lean plant layout cuts across all industries, from food and chemical processing to car and textile manufacturing. Overall, regardless of industry, a lean, eco-friendly facility design yields the following core benefits.

Enhances Resource Efficiency and Reduces Waste

The founding concept behind the lean methodology is optimizing available resources to get maximum customer value while minimizing waste. To achieve optimal resource efficiency in plant operations and reduce energy consumption and emissions, you must reduce waste in the following areas:

• Transportation: Streamline your logistics, from materials in transit to deliveries, to operate at maximum efficiency.
• Material handling: Implement a lean material-handling system to streamline communication and execution of production instructions.
• Overproduction and overprocessing: Adopt the just-in-time lean manufacturing philosophy to avoid excess production and processing.

Transportation, material handling, and goods production are some of the major energy consumers and emission sources. Thus, when you achieve optimal efficiency in these areas, you’ll lower your emissions and optimize your plant’s energy consumption.

Facilitates Sustainable Material Selection and Design

Following lean principles helps you select sustainable materials and an eco-friendly design from the start. A lean, eco-friendly plant layout includes: 

• Renewable energy resources
• Biodegradable production materials like cork, bamboo, or mycelium foam
• Natural ventilation and cooling
• Energy-efficient heating and lighting

When designing a lean plant, your material choices should ideally be influenced by sustainability ratings over other factors such as cost and aesthetics. Evaluate your future sustainability goals and benchmark the lean principles when choosing your plant’s design, infrastructure, and construction materials.

Enhances Employee Engagement and Well-Being

The social sustainability aspect of a lean plant layout focuses on enhancing employees’ satisfaction, involvement, well-being, health, and general safety. A lean plant layout achieves this by:

• Enhancing ergonomics safety by providing tools and equipment that minimize body strain caused by insufficient workspace or improper posture
• Enhancing the aesthetics of the workplace and allocating workers enough space to work
• Setting up modern safety protocols to enhance workplace safety and avoid injuries 
• Setting up clear communication protocols that facilitate free interactions among workers

The lean principles of “create flow” and “continuous improvement” should be your guiding light when it comes to optimizing employee engagement and well-being.

Lean-Inspired Plant Layout Strategies

A lean-inspired plant layout strategy should, by default, promote the plant’s overall sustainability. Some of the primary concepts that define lean plant layout strategies include the following.

One-Piece Flow

One-piece flow is also called single-piece flow or continuous manufacturing. It’s a production method in which all manufactured goods go through continuous operations step by step, without a work-in-progress phase coming in between.

To actualize one-piece flow, you must design your plant layout to facilitate continuous production. This involves designing your workspace following the sequence of your work processes so there’s no excess space between processes that would encourage work-in-process buildup.

Cellular Manufacturing

Cellular manufacturing is a production system that combines all of the components and equipment of a production line into one integrated work cell. Cellular manufacturing is a key enabler of one-piece flow production. As such, an optimized lean plant layout utilizes both cellular and one-piece flow production to eliminate downtime and achieve optimal operational efficiency.

Just-in-Time Production 

Just-in-time production is a lean manufacturing strategy that produces goods on an as-needed basis following customer demand. JIT helps minimize inventory handling costs and enhance resource efficiency by manufacturing the right amount of goods to satisfy existing customer demand. 

With these three lean-inspired plant layout strategies, you’ll reduce production waste and utilize your manufacturing resources more efficiently. 

How Lean Consultants Can Help You Optimize Your Plant Layout

Achieving a lean plant layout isn’t an easy venture that you can pull off in a day without a well-considered plant layout strategy. You must perform value stream mapping for every step of your business cycle so you know which lean strategies will make your plant more eco-friendly and sustainable.

Although this can be resource- and time-intensive, you shouldn’t lose sleep over it, because lean consultants like Incito have your back. Just schedule a consultation with Incito, and we’ll get you started on the road toward lean plant layout optimization.