Boeing and its office supply provider OfficeMax are using Lean+ tools to drastically reduce packaging waste, fuel use and carbon emissions. A team found that random supply orders result in OfficeMax trucks making daily trips to Boeing sites, even when an order was small and not urgent. With each order packed in its own cardboard box, the process generated a large amount of packaging that then needed to be recycled.

After a Lean collaboration workshop held late last year, Boeing and OfficeMax began testing a new approach that cuts deliveries and replaces cardboard boxes with reusable containers, all while implementing lean and efficient methods for managing office supplies.

"We're currently testing this in a few buildings in Renton (Washington)," said Doug Perry of Boeing Shared Services Supplier Management, who leads the Environment, Health and Safety Supplier Engagement Team. "And we think this idea—or a variation of it—is probably the right thing to do across the enterprise," he said.

Similar projects with suppliers are happening at aircraft assembly sites.

Boeing Commercial Airplanes technical teams have been working with suppliers for years to redesign shipping crates for aircraft parts to reduce waste or to make containers reusable.

One team at the Boeing Interiors Responsibility Center in Everett, Washington, was concerned that 60 to 70 wooden pallets were being discarded each week after shipments from a California-based supplier were unloaded. By working with the supplier, the empty pallets are now reloaded on the supplier's returning truck to be reused for future shipments. 

A supplier of insulation blankets for the C-17 also stopped using disposable cardboard packaging after working with Boeing to reengineer the blanket production process to increase quality and productivity. The project with supplier Orcon Mexico focused primarily on reducing inventory and unnecessary handling, which has many environmental benefits such as paperless ordering, reduced transportation and related emissions, and saving 5,600 cardboard shipping containers annually.