Lean and Green Supply Chains – Key Practices, Inter Linkages and Effects on Sustainability - A Case Study with Reference to Automobile Industry

The need of time is to find a competitive supply chain strategy for Organizations. Lean and Green are the appropriate strategies recommended for competitiveness and sustainability, But the grey area is their integration and impact on each other. Lean Practices being followed since long and are very well recognized and accepted in the Organizations, whereas Green Concept is relatively new and still struggling to find its way in the Industry supply chains. In View of current environmental scenario, there is Huge pressure on Industry to build and adopt process, favorable to environmental sustainability. Green Supply Chain is the option available but it needs to be linked with Lean Practices to find a competitive edge with benefits to Organization and contribution to nature. This Paper aims to identify key practices of Lean & Green Supply Chain strategies and their inter linkages in terms of issues and impacts. The structured analysis approach is adopted to improve performance of Automotive supply chain by integration of Lean and Green Strategies. An Automobile OEM was selected for the study. Data collection and Analysis was done to find out Prevailing Lean and Green Practices in the organization. Research carried out to find out integration scope amongst these practices and add/implement new Green Practices. Results derived after integration and implementation. An integrated Supply Chain Model developed with benefits of Green and Lean. The Model Provides a route map for developing sustainable Green Supply chains with acceptability and adoptability in Industry