Total Quality Management and Lean Manufacturing: A Total Sustainability Management Framework

Dear Colleagues,

Following the seminal article by Kleindorfer et al. in 2005, sustainable operations and supply chain management have become a mainstream research topic. Despite extensive growth as a research field, a number of critical points, listed below, suggest that its actual impact on environmental sustainability remains limited.

• Research papers tend to focus either on product sustainability (e.g., a green electrical vehicle) or the manufacturing process used to make this product (e.g., a lean and green process), but never do these two scopes meet. This leads to all sorts of paradoxes, e.g., a polluting vehicle made in a green factory.
• Too much research has been about profitable projects that reduce environmental harm. Always seeking win–win projects is insufficient. There should be more research about the trade-offs between financial imperatives and environmental performance (Pagell and Shevchenko, 2014) and more radical innovation (Van Wassenhove, 2019) toward operation systems that eliminate harm altogether.
• The research focus has been on operation improvements that reduce environmental harm from today onward, but not about solving legacy sustainability problems. The nature of sustainability challenges is cumulative, e.g., the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the great Pacific garbage patch; and the increasing levels of space debris in orbit. Even if all operation systems became sustainable, it does not mean that the current environmental issues would be solved.

At the 2016 World Operations Management conference, Stratton et al. (2016) reviewed the key historical operation management developments (manufacturing strategy, total quality management, lean and the theory of constraints), and they argue that all these operation paradigm shifts come from trying to resolve a conflict between cost and another performance dimension. This is exactly the challenge that we face today when it comes to designing and operating truly sustainable operation management systems.

In this Special Issue, we encourage researchers to re-purpose or customize the systemic design of integrated management framework such as total quality management and lean manufacturing in order to contribute to the development a new operations management paradigm shift. A total sustainability management framework should encapsulate key values, distinct approaches or “toolboxes”, and frameworks to design and implement system change.

A non-exhaustive list of possible topics is outlined below:

• Re-purposing total quality management into total sustainability management, from both a technical and conceptual perspectives.
• Can the contribution from lean to sustainability be extended beyond manufacturing processes?
• Which operation management tools can be re-purposed to measure and characterize sustainability issues?
• What are the boundaries of sustainable operations and supply chain management? Are there limits to what the discipline can achieve in terms of sustainability impact? What are the wider societal constraints to designing truly sustainable operations systems?
• How can we resolve the product-process divide in sustainable operations?
• Papers presenting operations solutions to legacy sustainability problems.
• Papers that empirically measure sustainability trade-offs

This Special Issue especially welcomes papers with a focus on next-generation operation management and interdisciplinary papers. Papers can be conceptual, modeling or empirical papers.

References

Kleindorfer, P.R., Singhal, K., and Van Wassenhove, L.N. (2005) “Sustainable operations management”, Production and Operations Management, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 482-492.

Pagell, M., & Shevchenko, A. (2014) “Why research in sustainable supply chain management should have no future. Journal of supply chain management, Vol. 50, No. 1, pp. 44-55.

Stratton, R., de Leeuw, S., and Sabet, E. (2016) “Exploring the seminal origins of key operations management developments”, Proceedings of the 2016 P&OM World Conference, Havana, Cuba, available at https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/conference_contribution/Exploring_the_seminal_origins_of_key_operations_management_developments/9553793/1/files/17185544.pdf

Van Wassenhove, L.N. (2019) “Sustainable innovation: pushing the boundaries of traditional operations management”, Production and Operations Management, Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 2930-2945.

Dr. Michel J. Leseure
Guest Editor

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• operations
• supply chain
• trade-off
• reversing environmental issues
• total quality management
• lean
• theory of constraints
• zero impact