Kaizen

Kaizen is a learning process intended to improve a process or service, eliminating waste while creating more value.  When done correctly, it eliminates hard work and teaches people how to see and eliminate waste in their own business processes.

In Japanese, Kaizen derives from two characters meaning something like "change" and "good."  The Kaizen philosophy focuses on processes and results in a systematic way, understanding how each piece fits into the "big picture."  Driven by respect for people, Kaizen is a non-judgemental and non-blaming way for stakeholders to improve a process together.

UNC used a Kaizen workshop to generate carbon saving ideas for the supply chain.  The University’s supply chain, from procurement through recycling, is an important part of the campus carbon footprint, but it is difficult to assess the impact of carbon reduction programs as they filter through a population of 40,000 faculty, students and staff.  Instead of simply mandating policies from the top, the Kaizen tapped into employee creativity for savings.

But where to focus in a complex supply chain?  The EPA estimates that over two metric tons of CO2 are emitted in the harvesting, processing, and disposal of one ton of paper.  UNC consumes an estimated 100,000,000 sheets per year, or roughly 500 tons – a meaningful target for emission reductions.  The carbon emissions for a computer’s life cycle top 15 metric tons per ton of equipment, and with over 80,000 computers on campus, these also became a focus for reduction.  As the team explored these two seemingly disparate parts of the supply chain, exciting synergies began to emerge.

Stakeholders representing the purchasing department, computer labs, students, the recycling office, and others were invited for a two-day Kaizen workshop.  The goal was to understand the true value of paper and computer use to the campus community, and to identify wasted time, resources, or energy that could be eliminated without reducing that value. 

The group recognized that faculty, staff, students, vendors, and alumni are customers of the IT department.  These customers value reliability, information security, storage space, uptime, speed, support, low cost, etc.  Any carbon reduction or sustainability goals must take these values into account, so that the program doesn’t accidentally decrease quality or satisfaction.  For instance, we could eliminate our backup file storage system to save material, money, and energy, but this would violate the customer’s desire for reliability.

With a firm sense of customer value, the groups moved to an interactive Value Stream Mapping exercise.  The value stream map describes the people, materials and activities involved at each phase of a process, from start to finish.

Once the entire process was visualized on the wall, it became easier to see the waste, errors, and problems.  For example, the team members noticed that when placing an order from a local vendor, it automatically came with a copy of the vendor’s catalog – an unnecessary use of paper.  At another step, the group realized that students choose to print more documents because their laptops are cumbersome, or because some professors forbid laptops in class. 

Each source of waste was addressed with ideas to solve the problem, and all told, the group came up with almost 100 improvement opportunities in just one afternoon.  For example, paper-saving ideas ranged from the common (double-sided printing) to the unusual and unique (use the monitor settings employed by journalists to ease eye strain when reading from a screen).  These ideas were ranked by their impact on the campus carbon footprint, and on the difficulty of implementation, resulting in a helpful list of high-impact, low-difficulty options for the Climate Action Plan. 

By engaging a diverse group of stakeholders in the planning phase, each idea was reviewed with scrutiny and creativity, allowing only the viable options to surface.  With such broad understanding and buy-in, these carbon abatement opportunities have a strong potential for adoption and success.