Integration of energy saving with lean production in a food processing company

Increasing the energy efficiency has become a key concern in manufacturing companies due to the increased energy costs and the environmental impacts. More efficient energy saving can make the most economic contribution towards solving these problems in the short run. Companies’ governments are striving to identify the most effective measures to improve energy efficiency in manufacturing processes. The specific energy consumption (SEC) is a key performance indicator used to measure the energy consumed per product. Therefore, an improvement of this value contributes to decouple of economic growth from related increase of energy consumption. This paper highlights the needs of manufacturing companies for integrating energy performance in production management. This work focuses on studying the impact of implementing lean production concepts on decreasing the SEC in a food processing organization. The reduction of SEC can be achieved by increasing the total efficiency of the production line. Implementing the lean production methodology by using energy management model achieve an increase in the production output. The lean production used to eliminate all kinds of waste in production, while using the same input resources such as raw material and energy. The main source of waste found on the production line is the defective product and time waste during changeover and manual process. The achieved results showed that the SEC improved by 15.1% by reducing the lean wastes in the production line. Implementation of lean methodology has a great impact on improving the energy saving by reducing the specific energy consumption in the organization. The SEC is a key performance indicator used to measure the efficiency of a production line or a machine in relation to its production. Energy management model is useful in identifying the area of improvement and the energy saving measure.