With increased regulation and pressure to cut the costs, many businesses are now facing a challenge to monitor their processes and make their operations more effective and efficient. An increasing number of managers are now discovering the benefits of becoming a greener and leaner organization. Lean manufacturing principles were developed by Toyota in the 1930s, and can help organizations provide more value while using fewer resources. Find out more below.

Measure Everything

The first step in making your organization greener and leaner is knowing exactly how you use your resources. You have to put a system in place to allow you to measure everything. From worker hours to raw materials, waste, and time, fuel and energy costs, and other regular expenses, businesses have to track their spending to determine the best ways of improving their processes. There are some great software out there that will automate process monitoring.

Find the Weak Points

Once you have reviewed your value chain and operations, it is time to identify the development areas. If you are good at getting urgent jobs done, but the packaging is an issue, you will have to focus on that process to make your business more efficient. If you are wasting a lot of raw materials by not having a quality check at an early stage, you are not doing any favors for your company or the environment, and you need to make a change.

Improve Organizational Knowledge

One of the best ways of making your company greener and more efficient while moving forward is to train your staff on how to improve their work, productivity, and communication. If the communication channels between two overlapping departments or those that depend on each other’s output are not working properly, you will need to face long delays and waste of time and resources.

Embrace Technology

There are several great tools available for service and manufacturing industry companies to help them reduce their operational costs and improve their efficiency. As an example, you could install water flow meters to determine exactly how much water one manufacturing process takes. Likewise, you can monitor your employees’ performance, and track how long each office worker takes to process a customer order.  

Simplify Everything

One of the main reasons for ineffective business operation and waste of resources is that processes are too complicated and hard to follow. If you can simplify some of the processes and take advantage of the technology available, you can spend less time and resources on completing each stage. You should always listen to your employees’ suggestions, as they know the best what is not working properly or where you are losing business efficiency and profits.

If you would like to comply with the latest green initiatives and save money at the same time, you will have to focus on providing more value for your customers while reducing your resource use. You should monitor each process, measure the resources used, eliminate waste, and train your employees to embrace the simpler and more efficient technologies.