Using lean and green indexes to measure companies' performance

Abstract

Companies are looking for innovative management paradigms to support their cost and time reduction efforts to increase the efficiency of their processes. The Lean paradigm has great relevance in the companies' need to reduce waste, particularly in manufacturing companies. On the other hand, waste reduction in companies has gained a new dimension not only at the economic level but also at the environmental level with the introduction of the Green paradigm. As such, manufacturing companies have been adopting management practices to reduce the impact of their activities on the environment and/or increase the efficiency of their processes. The present chapter proposes two indexes, the Lean Index and the Green Index, to enable the measurement of the performance of Portuguese manufacturing companies relating to the implementation of Lean and Green practices. The data used to create the Lean and Green indexes were obtained from the implementation of the European Manufacturing Survey 2012 in Portugal. The survey questions related to the implementation of Lean and Green practices are used as variables in the development of the model for the two indexes. For the construction of representative expressions of Lean Index and Green Indexes, factorial analysis was applied for assigning the variables, weights and aggregation.