Towards a smart lean green production paradigm to improve operational performance

Over the past decades more and more production companies have adopted the lean paradigm to get operational performance improvements. More recently, the competitive environment is requiring an increasing attention towards sustainability issues leading to the implementation of practices to also improve sustainability performance and, in particular, the environmental impacts. The relationships between lean and green approaches in terms of their mutual influence in achieving target performance have been investigated in several studies (see for example (Dieste et al., 2019)– (Henao et al., 2019)). Most of related studies identify a supportive relationship between the two paradigms, and only few negative effects have been identified. Whilst the impact on performance in lean-green contexts has become a field of research in its own, little has been said in literature about how the new Industry 4.0 (smart manufacturing) paradigm and the emerging technologies, impacting in every area of a production company, can be of support to further strengthen the lean-green binomial (an exception is represented by (Duarte and Cruz-Machado, 2017)). This paper aims at proposing a framework to analyse how a smart environment relying on the Industry 4.0 tools and technologies can support the evolution of a lean-green company towards higher levels of operational performance. The final goal is to support practitioners in the strategic choice of what smart technologies to adopt in combination with selected lean and green practices to create an impact on selected operations strategy indicators or to identify initiatives to fill operational gaps in the context of a continuous improvement and radical innovations plans. Such approach may serve as a signpost for the shaping of operations strategies, especially in relation to technology management. In order to achieve the above-mentioned goal, a four-step methodology has been adopted to review the existing literature and to organize it in a way that allows highlighting the impacts of smart technologies, lean and green practices on performance indicators and to identify possible reciprocal influences. Eventually, to get a validation of the proposed approach, a semi-structured interview has been shared with four manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to get their perspective on framework potential benefits.