Targeting lean and green goals in the greedy energy industry

In modern industry, companies adopt Lean Management (LM) to increase efficiency and productivity and to reduce wastes and no-value added activities. In parallel, according to the international regulations, rising attention is toward Green Management (GM) to minimize environmental emissions. Despite the most of the existing literature contributions focuses on such two topics separately, an emerging trend analyzes the integration and relationships between LM and GM. This paper follows this stream and addresses the integration between LM and GM in the greedy energy industry, i.e. industry using machines characterized by time and energy consuming phase-in and switch-off setup times. These times represent low-value added activities because production is off and significant CO2 emissions take place. In this paper, an original bi-objective model minimizes the environmental emissions generated by the overall process, i.e. the green objective function, and the cumulative stock in terms of gap between the production rate and the customer demand, i.e. the lean objective function, matching the Just-in-Time (JIT) principles aiming at producing what the customers need, when needed. The model application to a study-case gets emission reduction and good market demand matching.