Sustainability for heavy engineering equipment industries using lean concepts

Abstract EN

Steel is one of the most used materials in the industry.

In particular, Steel is the dominating material used in the fabrication of heavy engineering equipment.

It is estimated that the world‟s annual production of Steel is 1500 Million tons.

One of the best ways to reduce such environmental hazard is by recycling of Steel.

Recycling of Steel is widely implemented and in terms of tonnage Steel is the most recycled material in the world.

Currently, it is estimated that 85% of annual steel production is recycled worldwide.

Sustainability benefits of recycling steel include conserving valuable natural resources and raw materials and eliminate negative environmental effects.

However, in many cases, handling and transportation of scrap steels to recycling facilities and locations may not be feasible due to many reasons such as transportation cost, scrap bulky sizes and shapes, or scrap quantities.

Therefore, in such cases Steel scrap presents a real problem to relevant industries; heavy engineering equipment industries present an example of suffering industries.

Lean Manufacturing is one of the best ways to run a manufacturing company and Lean principles have been successfully applied in many industries in the last two decades or so.

In this paper a “Road Map” for a heavy engineering equipment company is suggested to make use of huge amounts of steel by recycling.

A case study is selected to be on one of the Iraqi Ministry of Oil Companies.

The aim is to develop and apply Lean concepts to reduce and eliminate Steel scrap accumulation.

The paper takes into consideration the actual accumulated Steel scrap resulting from the company processes for ten years.

The results of the paper show that applying of the Lean concept will beneficially lead to reducing the accumulated scrap over the years and accordingly save a lot of resources.

The conclusions demonstrate that sustainability is fruitful to be adopted in this area.