Lean and Green Management in Industry 4.0: Perspectives, Challenges, and Prospects
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Economic and Business Aspects of Sustainability".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (7 July 2022) | Viewed by 5195
Special Issue Editor
Interests: lean manufacturing; green management; supply chain; business models; industry 4.0; digital factories
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Lean and Green management is an integrated approach, combining paradigms with different drivers, objectives, and principles, which complement each other. This integrated approach generates a system that seeks to maximize business process efficiency and overall profitability on the basis of continuous improvement, elimination of all kinds of waste, better use of all types of resources, and increase of customer value. For its implementation, characteristics such as leadership commitment, employee involvement, changes in organizational culture, government regulations, and standards, safer working conditions, favorable stakeholder relationships, and information sharing should be adopted. Integrated approaches can be applied by companies in different areas for sustainable business development.
Industry 4.0 aims to use a new method to create customer value. Industry 4.0 represents an intelligent environment that integrates different emerging technologies like the internet of things and services, big-data analytics, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing, collaborative robots, and artificial vision. The integration of these technologies with industrial automation and organizational business will promote improvements in companies. Industry 4.0 is based on cyber-physical systems which integrate the digital virtual world with the real physical world, allowing connections between objects, people, and information and thus facilitating communication and interactions and creating a true networked environment. This requires a radical change in companies’ processes.
The Lean and Green management and Industry 4.0 approaches have a great potential to solve future challenges a company may encounter when developing and applying its value chain and network. However, it is not clear if the Lean and Green approach will be well deployed, considering the new characteristics and programs of Industry 4.0. Lean and Green management is more focused on physical processes than on virtual and technological processes. It is still not clear how Lean and Green management should evolve to be efficient in the Industry 4.0 environment.
The purpose of this Special Issue is to gather studies revealing and discussing challenges and perspectives of Lean and Green management in Industry 4.0 on the levels of manufacturing, supply chain, value networks, companies, and industries.
Prof. Dr. Susana Duarte
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- lean
- green
- industry 4.0
- lean and green
- supply chain
- value networks
- digitalization
