![]() Lean and Six Sigma were emerged during the last half of the 20th century and were the field of investigation for the researchers and practitioners. Ozcelik (2010) reported that US service organizations had improved their service quality by the implementation of Six Sigma. Few of the organizations benefited adopting Lean and Six Sigma are General Electric, Bank of America, American Express, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Du Pont, Posco, Samsung, Ford, TX Instruments, Allied Signal (or Honeywell today), Kodak, Sony, US Military, General Motors, Chrysler and many more ( Antony, 2007 Antony et al., 2017 Antony and Banuelas, 2002 Heckl et al., 2010 Henderson and Evans, 2000 Holweg, 2007 Snee, 2005 Snee and Hoerl, 2005). Since the inception of Lean and Six Sigma, the number of the organizations adopted Lean and Six Sigma individually during the last 20 years of the 20th century and successfully achieved the improvements in the organizations and realized a positive impact on the firm’s performance ( Antony et al., 2017 Sahoo and Yadav, 2018). On the other hand, the Six Sigma approach initiated, aiming to reduce variations in the process at Motorola and resulted in dramatic improvement ( Kuvvetli et al., 2016). As a continuous improvement approach, the lean concept originated from the TPS, focusing on doing more with less ( Prasad et al., 2016). With a focus on customer delight, profitability and reduced cost, “quality” emerged as a central point for the organizations ( Sunder, 2016a). In today’s competitive world, enhancing the quality of the products and processes through continuous improvements is one of the prime objectives for any organization ( Thomas et al., 2009). According to the Wheeler and Poling (1998), QI/CI be termed as an approach to address the issues with logical and critical thinking, prompt and timely adoption of improvements, and then the use of process behavior charts to maintain the gains ( Wheeler and Poling, 1998). These are also termed as “quality improvement (QI)” or “continuous improvement (CI)” strategy. Some of the philosophies adopted in different parts of the world were are Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle ( Deming, 1986), company-wide quality control ( Ishikawa, 1984), Toyota Production System ( Ohno, 1988), Six Sigma ( Harry, 1998), Lean manufacturing ( Womack et al., 1990), total productive maintenance ( Nakajima, 1989), total quality management ( Feigenbaum, 1991), etc. Organizations evolved and developed numerous tools and techniques during the past century as part of the improvement process, resulting in various methodologies/strategies. ![]() Quality, as a value proposition, becomes one of the key ingredients not only in product/service but also in processes. ![]() Due to global competition and rapid development in technology, organizations are experiencing some challenges as innovative and value-enhanced products, wide customer expectations, shorter product development cycles, lowest cost, etc ( Bhamu and Sangwan, 2014). Many countries worldwide experienced the effects of globalization post Second World War and continued to experience in the 21st century. Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited
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