A review of critical success factors for the successful implementation of Lean Six Sigma and Six Sigma in manufacturing small and medium sized enterprises

Abstract

Organizations embarking on implementation of Lean Six Sigma and Six Sigma improvement initiatives need to overcome substantial barriers to ensure effectiveness of the implemented approaches. In many cases, implementation of improvement initiatives involves significant investment in establishment of supporting infrastructure and training for the improvement initiatives. While Lean Six Sigma and Six Sigma were initially applied within large corporations, the interest of small and medium-sized enterprises in improvement initiatives is increasing.Implementation of Lean Six Sigma and Six Sigma faces unique barriers in small and medium-sized enterprises associated with the size and availability of the resources. Thus, the aim of this article is to examine the critical success factors that condition successfulness of Lean Six Sigma and Six Sigma implementation in manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises. Based on seven articles from six countries (UK, India, Italy, Kenya, Netherland, Malaysia), the importance of the different critical success factors are examined and compared. Further, the proposed study examines differences in the importance of the critical success factors between small and medium-sized enterprises and large corporations. For the conduct of this analysis, six additional papers from Europe, India and Brazil concerning critical success factors for the implementation of Six Sigma and Lean Sigma in larger manufacturing enterprises were taken into account. Moreover, five priority groups of critical success factors are developed for both organization sizes based on a percentile distribution. The analysis of the identified groups demonstrates similarities in the critical success factors for both types of organizations. In conclusion, it can be stated that "top management commitment" and "linking Six Sigma to business strategy" are the top priority critical success factors, for both small and mediumsized enterprises and large organizations. Additionally, for small and medium-sized enterprises, it is necessary to develop a good communication plan and link Six Sigma to customers.

Product Quality Improvement Policies in Industry 4.0: Characteristics, Enabling Factors, Barriers, and Evolution Toward Zero Defect Manufacturing

“…Many articles, like Patel and Desai (2018), Dedy et al (2016), Lande et al (2016), and Stankalla et al (2018) list critical factors to be taken into account during the implementation of a QMS. These factors can be presented as success factors or as barriers to avoid during implementation.…”

“…Only one paper (Kedar et al, 2008) studied a combination of the five philosophies. Seven papers (Arnheiter and Maleyeff, 2005;Bendell, 2006;Kasemset, 2011;Alhuraish et al, 2015;Pacheco et al, 2015;Costa et al, 2018;Stankalla et al, 2018;Makwana and Patange, 2019) have focused on a combination of two philosophies and the rest has concentrated the effort on one main one. Figure 1 illustrates the distribution by year of the analyzed review articles.…”

“…• Use of proper communication to avoid misunderstanding: As explained in the first point, strategies of quality improvement are defined by the top management. Afterwards, the message is carried by intermediates across the (Gupta and Jain, 2013;Bhamu and Singh Sangwan, 2014;Sundar et al, 2014;Yusup et al, 2015) SS (Oke, 2007;Kumar and Antony, 2008;Gamal Aboelmaged, 2010;Stankalla et al, 2018) L6S (Lande et al, 2016;Antony et al, 2017;Muraliraj et al, 2018;Ruben et al, 2018;Stankalla et al, 2018) 2 CSF Visible management commitment LM (Costa et al, 2018) SS (Oke, 2007;Kumar and Antony, 2008;Gamal Aboelmaged, 2010;Tjahjono et al, 2010;Costa et al, 2018;Stankalla et al, 2018) L6S (Lande et al, 2016;Antony et al, 2017;Muraliraj et al, 2018;Ruben et al, 2018;Stankalla et al, 2018) TQM (Al-Khalili and Subari, 2014) 3 CSF Trained workers on the philosophies of quality improvement LM (Gupta and Jain, 2013;Bhamu and Singh Sangwan, 2014;Sundar et al, 2014;Costa et al, 2018) SS (Oke, 2007;Kumar and Antony, 2008;Gamal Aboelmaged, 2010;Costa et al, 2018;Stankalla et al, 2018) L6S (Lande et al, 2016;Muraliraj et al, 2018;Ruben et al, 2018;Stankalla et al, 2018) 4 CSF Good identification and prioritization of improvements LM…”

Studying the Interrelationship amongst various Success Factors for Implementing Six Sigma in Indian Manufacturing SMEs

“…Since, the origin of Six Sigma, increasing competitiveness of organization seems to be extremely common in the sectors of business [10][11][12]. Stanklla et al [12] critically review various critical factors for successful implementation of six sigma in SMEs.…”

“…Since, the origin of Six Sigma, increasing competitiveness of organization seems to be extremely common in the sectors of business [10][11][12]. Stanklla et al [12] critically review various critical factors for successful implementation of six sigma in SMEs. This reference reviews the articles from countries such as Australia [13] , UK [14][15][16] , India [17][18][19][20][21][22], Pakistan [23,24], Taiwan [26,27] to identify various critical success factors for implementing six sigma in small and medium sized enterprises.…”