Why being green is hard: culture

On a recent visit with Rockwell Automation to get
an overview of their solutions for sustainable production, we
discussed one of the biggest reasons green & sustainable
production operations are hard to implement. The reason isn’t
technology limitations–it’s cultural differences between job
functions and departments.

As Marcia Walker, program manager for Rockwell Automation’s
Sustainable Production Solutions points out, “sustainable
production could happen quicker, but often times it’s the human
element that is holding things back.” People with competing points
of view and job goals need to be involved in sustainability, notes
Walker, but all too often, they don’t communicate with each other.
As a result, green efforts end up scattered and isolated.

Cultural divides in manufacturing can be tricky to solve. Just look
at how long it’s taken for efforts like S-95 “plant-to-enterprise”
integration to make progress on bridging the divide between
industrial automation and enterprise resource management. But we
should learn from past experiences like S-95.

One reason S-95 has been a success is that these programs bring
together people from industrial automation and control with people
from production, supply chain, IT, and executive management.
Successful IT departments often cultivate a population of
“Manufacturing IT” experts for work on S-95 efforts, and ensure
there is senior executive involvement.. Similarly, with
sustainability, a cross-functional team needs to come together, and
top leaders need to be involved.

The sustainability team probably might even need to be broader
based than the team involved in S-95, because when you consider all
the factors involved with green & sustainability (i.e., social,
environmental, safety, brand integrity, and even market cap), the
ramifications are quite broad indeed. This breadth of what’s at
stake is reflected in the term “triple bottom line” (economic;
environmental; social) to describe the diverse ways that
sustainability helps companies flourish.

Another factor in briding the cultural divides for a triple bottom
line is to establish “bottoms-up” mechnisms for feedback and
improvement. Again, we can learn from past efforts, specifically,
lean manufacturing teams.

On Earth Day, I attended a conference put on by the University of
Wisconsin-Green Bay’s new Environmental Management & Business
Institute (EMBI). At a session at this “Green Innovations”
conference, Steve Dunn, an associate professor at UW-Oshkosh who
teaches supply chain management, noted that many companies have a
built-in resource that could be tapped to address energy savings
and sustainability: their lean manufacturing teams. Since lean
teams are all about identifying sources of waste in areas like
inventory and cycle times, Dunn says, it’s pretty natural to
leverage those same people to think of ways to save energy and cut
other forms of environmental waste.

The catch is that leveraging existing expertise and bringing people
together across functional divides isn’t exactly easy. But it needs
to be done, and in the end, is more important than any single
“sustainability” technology.