Six Sigma For Sustainability In Multinational Organizations

Abstract

The Six Sigma model provides various kinds of sustainability to companies in terms of quality enhancement, zero defect level, market share enhancement, optimal production level and financial returns. Multinational companies are more orientated toward implementation of Six Sigma than small scale locally held companies. Numerous larger companies have so far implemented Six Sigma including 3M, Caterpillar, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Amazon.com, DHL, SGL group, Dell, Ford Motor Company, DuPont, McGraw Hill Companies and HSBC group. Implementation of Six Sigma requires considerable cost and effort in terms of human resource training and reformulation of business processes. This study is an attempt to find what kind of sustainability motivates multinational companies to invest in Six Sigma. Sustainability identified includes social sustainability, environmental sustainability, and economic sustainability. With the aid of interviews, a constant comparison study is conducted in order to find the most prevalent type of sustainability offered by Six Sigma. A sample is drawn from multinational companies which have already implemented Six Sigma in their operations. The findings suggest that multinational companies implement Six Sigma in order to attain economic sustainability through various means such as market share, customer base, and social sustainability.

Lean Six Sigma effect on Jordanian pharmaceutical industry’s performance

“…Six Sigma was introduced in 1980 by engineer M. Harry at Motorola to reduce waste and improve performance (Radhakrishnan and Balamurugan, 2011). Six Sigma is a multidimensional method for developing process efficiency and attaining sustainability (AlSagheer, 2011). Six Sigma is a quality improvement structure for identified industry (Goh, 2011).…”

“…There are six metrics to measure Six Sigma: risk management, revenue growth, retained revenue, increased capacity, cost reduction and cost avoidance (DeRuntz and Meier, 2010). AlSagheer (2011) used financial achievement, zero defect level and competition. Yusr et al (2011) used Six Sigma to increase market share, profitability and customer satisfaction by using statistical tools that can lead to a high performance.…”

A systematic literature review on Sustainable Lean Six Sigma

“…The globalization of business has made organizations work for world-class level quality of their products and services. The organizations which have adopted strategies such as Lean Six Sigma are concerned about quality and productivity of their products/services and their value in the competitive market (AlSagheer, 2011). Nowadays, because of the effect of global warming and environmental degradation all over the world, it has become very important for the organizations to consider the factors related to the environmental effects of their each and every action of production (Cherrafi et al , 2017a, 2017b; Kumar et al , 2015).…”

A Systematic Literature Review for Better Understanding of Lean Driven Sustainability

“…Lean and sustainability integration has some soft spots in terms of technical tools to measure all aspects of TBL concept, which may be covered for through further integration with other methodologies with stronger quantitative toolkits such as Six-Sigma, LCA, etc. Such an integration has also been highlighted by many researchers [161,[279][280][281][282][283]].…”