Development of collaborative green lean production systems

Abstract: This thesis deals with development of lean and green production systems from an action research point of view. The studies focus on Swedish-based automotive and vehicle industries and their aims to integrate sustainable thinking and environmental care into their operations management.Starting from operations management in manufacturing and corporate sustainable development, the research is built on how to integrate these two views into one production system. The systematic structure of a multiple-target improvement process with methodologies and tools designed to achieve the sustainability vision has been studied. Since lean as well as green production is based on the entire value chain, the research has gone beyond legal company limits and included the collaborative efforts between suppliers and customers in the value chain.The thesis includes six papers and describes approaches on how to implement integration, how to structure and integrate improvement management systems, how to set up an integrated monitoring and control system for the business and how to organise and redesign green lean tools and methodologies to support collaboration towards common targets.The results can be used for exploration and hypothesis formulation for further studies and development of integrated production systems and collaboration systems. The thesis helps answering how to integrate and implement company-specific green lean production systems.