Lean Manufacturing provides organisations with tools to improve their competitiveness based on increasing customer value in terms of productivity, efficiency, quality and consumer satisfaction by reducing resource consumption through the elimination of 7 wastes (transport, inventory, motion, waiting, over-processing, over-production).

Green Manufacturing can be defined as Lean Manufacturing with a renewed interest in developing greener solutions capable of not only minimising waste, but also reducing the negative environmental and social impacts (minimising health risks) of traditional industrial practices throughout the product life cycle.

The objective of both approaches is the same - to minimise non-value added activities with a focus on waste reduction, people and organisation, lead time reduction, supply chain relationships, KPI service levels tools and practices. They can be very effective when unified and implemented simultaneously (see figure in additional information Affiliation amid Lean-Green Methods).

The International Standard Organisation (ISO) has developed an international standard for environmental management systems known as ISO14001:2015. These standards act as a systematic continuous improvement tool to implement Green Manufacturing.