Sustainability, lean, green and eco-efficiency symbioses

A literature review was conducted aiming at investigating the use of Sustainability, Lean, Green and eco-efficiency concepts, as well as meaningful combinations of those, on the field of Production and Operations Management. The study reports on the scientific papers published in all major journals in the field over the period 2001–2015. A set of 83 papers from 40 journals were selected for further analyzes, aiming at uncovering the existing level of awareness and use of the synergic and symbiotic relationship between Lean Manufacturing and Green Production. The findings show that a modest share of papers, about 30 %, explicitly recognize the Lean-Green joint approach. The same study testifies a clear growth pattern, which is patently reinforced in the last two and a half years, on the number of papers that behold a combined approach towards more efficient and cleaner production activities. The research has highlighted that the Lean-Green link does, in fact, exist and is gaining momentum, but requires further reinforcements from the scientific community, as well as from the companies, to deliver excelled and environmentally sound production systems.FCT Strategic Project PEst2015-2020, reference UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The lean-green BOPSE indicator to assess efficiency and sustainability

Over the years, companies have been progressing their management strategies and transforming their production systems to cope with the pressing environmental challenges and remain competitive, prosper and meet themarket demands. It is no longer enough to only satisfy the demand. The companies face a new transformation on the way of "doing things", being it the way performance and efficiency is improved, or its relationship with all the stakeholders. Lean manufacturing and eco-efficiency propose a setting for progressively reducingwastes and environmental impacts. Although Lean Production was not developed to directly tackle sustainability issues, its principles and practices convey benefits that could be put, unquestionably, under the umbrella of Green and resulting in synergies known as the Lean-Green link. This chapter aims to present the Business Overall Performance and Sustainability Effectiveness (BOPSE) indicator, which is intended to measure the companies' Lean-Green compliance. The BOPSE indicator is an integrated metric on companies' operational performance and sustainability conformity. This indicator exploits the Lean-Green production synergies and is operationalized through an indicator that aggregates and combines Lean production and Green production features. This indicator weaves a number of sustainability issues, spread over its three dimensions, with those encompassed by the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) indicator. Therefore, the BOPSE indicator intends to assess the effectiveness of the businesses grounded on operational performance and sustainability compliance, aiming at identifying both specific limitations and broader opportunities for the global improvement of the companies. Hence, the BOPSE indicator drives companies in their way to meet some of 17 sustainable development goals, namely the 8th-"Decent work and economic growth", and the 12th-"Responsible consumption and production" sustainable development goals.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013

Corporate governance and management practices: stakeholder involvement, quality and sustainability tools adoption: evidences in local public utilities

Local public services is the field in which New Public Management (NPM) and Public Governance (PG) issues are most in evidence. The local public services are characterized by the rethinking of the role played by local government in the provision of services. An evolution has taken place. From a traditional configuration in which local public services were managed by local governments they moved to a configuration where it takes place a separation between the local government role (which continues to be the guarantor of the satisfaction of public needs) and the role of local public utilities (LPUs) (responsible for delivering the services). This transformation implies both the delegation of resources and authority to lower organisational levels within the public sector and the reconfiguration of accountability chains between the state institutions and the society. In recent years, an intense debate has developed regarding the introduction of new tools and control systems. Particular attention has been paid to planning and control systems, human resources management systems, and performance management systems, leaving a few pioneers to develop their analysis on corporate governance mechanisms with regard their relationships with both the external (stakeholders) actors and the internal (management) ones. On one hand, the OECD wrote guidelines in order to ensure good corporate governance practices, focusing on relations with stakeholders. On the other hand, the dialogue between corporate governance and stakeholders has been already tackled by a number of International organizations guidelines or principles, following a debate on corporate governance that has progressively combined a stakeholder perspective with a more classic shareholder-maximizing model of governance. This article contributes at the debate on the stakeholder involvement process. By means of both a theoretical discussion and an empirical research conducted on 37 Italian LPUs, this paper attempts to analyse specific management tools which can be used to improve the quality of corporate governance in LPUs, through the enlargement of the stakeholder involvement. Some NPM’s tools, such as quality standards and sustainability tools imply an effort to offer new forms of organizational behaviour in the decision-making processes (i.e. the choice of the performance indicators and the reporting tools) and may create a dialogue between the enterprise and its stakeholders. In particular, in our study we focus on the adoption of quality standards (ISO 9000 and Customer Satisfaction) and sustainability tools (sustainability reports and ISO 14000 standard) as NPM’s tools to facilitate the stakeholder involvement practices