Construction of Lean and Green indexes to measure companies’ performance

• Author(s): Almeida, Diana Margarida Pereira de
• Date: 2014
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/14434
• Origin: Repositório Institucional da UNL
• Subject(s): Lean paradigm; Green paradigm; Indexes; Factorial analysis; Performance measurement
• Document Type: Master thesis
• Language: English
• Advisor(s): Remígio, Helena; Machado, Virgínia
• Contributor(s): RUN

Description

The demand for costs and time reductions in companies’ processes, in order to increase efficiency, leads companies to seek innovative management paradigms to support their needs for growth and continuous improvement. The Lean paradigm has great relevance in companies’ need for waste reduction, particularly in manufacturing companies. On the other hand the demand of companies for waste reduction has gained a new dimension not only at the material level, but also at the environmental level with the introduction of the Green paradigm. As such, manufacturing companies have been adopting practices that reduce the impact of their activities on the environment. Although nowadays many manufacturing companies already implement waste reduction practices related to Lean and Green paradigms, many of them are unable to understand specifically if their efforts are enough for the application of these practices to be successful or even if their actual performance in implementing Lean or Green practices reflects the self-assessment that they have of themselves. Thus, besides the study of the development of Lean and Green paradigms in recent years, the present dissertation has the important objective of the construction of two indexes (the Lean Index and the Green Index) enabling the measurement of the performance of Portuguese manufacturing companies relating the implementation of Lean and Green practices. The data used to create the Lean and Green indexes where obtained from the implementation of the European Manufacturing Survey 2012 in Portugal. The survey questions related to the implementation of Lean and Green practices are used as variables in the development of the model for the two indexes. For the construction of representative expressions of Lean Index and Green Index it was applied the Factorial Analysis for assigning the variables weights and aggregation.