YouTube: Lean Energy Treasure Hunts at GE

By Jon Miller | Post Date: August 27, 2009 1:06 PM | Comments: 2

Some of you have e-mailed for more information about the energy treasure hunts and how to do them. It's quite simple. The energy treasure hunt is the classic "go see" activity. Form a cross-functional team and go find energy waste. A benchmark is General Electric, who promotes their green activities on the GE Citizenship section of their website:

On a regular basis, GE performs energy "treasure hunts," a lean manufacturing process developed by Toyota, to help reduce our energy costs and carbon footprint. More than 200 treasure hunts have been conducted globally to date, a process that has driven a reduction in GHG emissions of 250,000 metric tons and saved the company over $100 million. Treasure hunts have been so successful even GE's theme parks have implemented them. In March 2008, a team of GE and NBC Universal employees set out on a treasure hunt at Universal Studios in California.

GE is also helping people hunt for energy treasures in Cincinnati Public Schools and also in their Global Research headquarters to reduce water consumption. Rather than talk about the treasure hunt, let's watch how GE does it:

The "Treasure Hunt" team in action

A Treasure Hunt at Universal Studios is Full of Surprises

Thank you for sharing, GE. This is what you call yokoten - copying a good idea and spreading it horizontally - in this case using the power of the GE public relations and YouTube.

$100 million for 200 treasure hunts. That's $500,000 per hunt. I wonder if this will be GE's new Six Sigma. Wouldn't it be better for GE to appy lean thinking (including respect for people) across all their value streams and uncover opportunities for energy savings during that process. I could see well intentioned energy treasure hunters coming up with ideas that would contradict lean thinking. For example, "If we double the batch size, we would reduce number of set-ups (energy savings), reduce start-up scrap (energy savings), reduce number of shipments (energy savings)." As an ex-GE employee I would see the treasure hunter winning this argument over a lean thinker. I love the idea of reducing energy costs but I wouldn't copy directly from GE. Take this good idea and apply it in context of lean thinking.

Poster: Gary | Post Date: August 28, 2009 7:10 AM

Hi Gary

Your comments are right on. We need to be careful when making improvements not to sub-optimize - improve one thing at the expense (possibly greater expense) of another. That said, I think the GE process is sound. They benchmarked Toyota and even were instructed by Toyota people in some dos and don'ts.

The $500,000 savings is an average and in some cases it is probably much more. The number is not surprising when you consider that GE has some giant holdings which use a tremendous amount of energy each year. The challenge with any improvement approach is to make a smooth transition from a event-driven "blitzes" like these to daily improvements zone by zone, owned by the local teams. Over the long run (decades) that is what makes true winners successful.

Poster: Jon Miller | Post Date: August 28, 2009 10:30 AM

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