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A Lean Approach to Designing Sustainable Value Chains in Food, Pharmaceutical and Chemical Industries

Projects Description

This is a portfolio, comprised of three main projects, that focuses on developing a sustainable and lean value chain by reducing and/or valorizing waste across food, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. The main objective of this program is to integrate students in the work field, improve their hands on experience, and at the same time to help renowned Lebanese industries to efficiently optimize their operations and increase their return. To reach such mutual objective, a combination of innovative engineering processes and advanced lean manufacturing tools and techniques will be implemented, and relevant key performance indicators will be thoroughly assessed to evaluate the improvement in the supply chain’s performance. Based on the need of our industrial partners, wastes will be either reduced or processed and converted into valuable end-products that can be sold to farmers, food, pharmaceutical, petrochemical, and/or cosmetics industries. The project has multidisciplinary facets that require the intervention of multiskilled students and professionals in different fields such as operations management, engineering (mainly petrochemical, food, mechanical and industrial engineering), chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacy, data analytics, marketing and advertising.

The projects that were initiated under this portfolio are the following:

The First Project aims at designing, modeling, and optimizing a sustainable castor oil value chain using advanced lean six sigma tools and techniques. In this context, specific pretreatments and emerging extraction techniques will be adopted to extract oil from castor seeds for multiple ulterior usages.

Within the scope of the second project, the research team will integrate lean manufacturing and six sigma approaches in the brewing process to improve the performance of a Lebanese Brewery. They will identify and reduce different types of wastes (defective products, excess energy consumption, inventory, motion, overproduction, transportation, processing, waiting lines and bottlenecks) to increase the manufacturing process efficiency.

Finally, the third project targets the implementation of lean and green practices in wineries. In this context, the losses generated from the production line of a Lebanese winery will be valorized by extracting some bioactive compounds. An emerging extraction process will be carried out to enhance the efficiency, yield and quality of the extracted compounds. The latter can be sold to pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries due to their antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, neuroprotection, and immunity boosting properties.

Desired Disciplines

Team Leader

Dr. Joelle Nader
PhD in Industrial Process Engineering
Assistant Professor of Operations and Production Management, ITOM department, AKSOB

Academic and Professional Collaborators

Industry Partners