Green and Lean Production Visualization Tools; A Case Study exploring EVSM

Sammanfattning: There is a great need for an environmental, economic and social sustainable society, meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations. Focusing on environmental sustainability, legislation and industrially accepted emission targets have emerged, on an overall level represented by e g the Kyoto protocol. Green as well as Lean production has thus become a more and more important topic in recent years. Based on the gigantic need for technologies and strategies that will reduce CO2 emissions globally, as well as customer demands for cost efficient and environmental friendly goods and processes, companies are starting to change their principles towards Green and Lean philosophies. In Green and/or Lean development, like other systematic approaches towards improved processes, there is a need for visualization tools to be used to analyze the supply chain and the manufacturing system. One possible visualization tool for this purpose is Environmental Value Stream Mapping, which has all the characteristics of its parent, VSM (Value Stream Mapping) and additional kaizen elements. In the EVSM, the environmental issues and the usage of material or energy have been added to the established VSM tool. However it has been almost four years since United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) has introduced EVSM and there is no reliable evaluation how this tool really works and can be implemented. Therefore there is a need to evaluate and possibly improve this tool, based on practice and the applicability in industry. A case study has been performed testing the EVSM tool in industry and is presented in this paper. The aim of the case study is to analyze how the EVSM tool can be used as well as implementing suggested changes, summarized into, an Environmental Flow Process Chart. The EVSM tool seems suitable for showing the parts of the process in the supply chain which has more waste of energy or material. Still, it lacks information about where and how this waste are generated and which element of the process that is making the most waste, indicating a need for improvement