Lean six sigma sustainability factors

Abstract

Lean Six Sigma has proven itself as an effective strategy for business success in both private and public sectors. The methodology has helped enterprise leaders recognize business processes as engines that drive performance excellence and help to deliver value. Lean Six Sigma offers a comprehensible road map, tools, and techniques for achieving superior performance.Many of the past Lean Six Sigma (LSS) researches focused on the study of success factors for LSS implementation. There is lack of research that explores the sustainability factors or factors for the continuation of LSS’s drive after the LSS implementation stage. Hence, this research intends to establish the fundamental concept of LSS sustainability based on the principles of sustainability. In addition, the research also aims to develop a LSS sustainability framework based on literature review and case study on a company that had implemented LSS for 15 years. The proposed LSS sustainability framework consist of 5 important sustainability factors, which are Continuous Improvement Culture, Innovative Culture, Management Team’s Approach, Employee Knowledge on LSS and Communication. The uniqueness of the framework is the framework not only summarized the key finding from literature review with regard to the sustainability and factors for sustainability of LSS, but the framework also reflects the actual setting of a company that has sustained LSS drive for the last 15 years A quantitative methodology was utilized for conducting this research. The survey questionnaires of 39 structured questions were developed and sent to 88 respondents through the emails. A total of 50 respondents responded answering all the 39 structure questions. Findings from the survey reveal the Employee LSS Knowledge and Continuous Improvement Culture has moderate relationship with organizational performance perceived by employee of company D. However the other 3 factors, innovation culture, communication and management team approach show weak relationship with organizational performance. This research suggested that company D need to increase education and training programs and pursue continuous improvement in order to continue to sustain performance. These results can help prevent or improve upon the weak relationship with organizational performance that many companies have experienced with these approaches and offer some explanations on potentially why these issues occurred. This research has also successfully developed a LSS sustainability model to predict the organization performance of company D.