According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

Purpose – Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is a continuous improvement methodology that aims to reduce the costs of poor quality, improve the bottom-line results and create value for both customers and shareholders. The purpose of this paper is to explore the critical failure factors for LSS in different sectors, such as manufacturing, services, higher education, etc. Design/methodology/approach – The following research is based on a systematic literature review of 56 papers that were published on Lean, Six Sigma and LSS in well-known academic databases from 1995 to 2013. Findings – There are 34 common failure factors of LSS cited in this paper. There are some common factors for failure, such as a lack of top management commitment and involvement, lack of communication, lack of training and education, limited resources and others. Many gaps and limitations are discussed in this paper and need to be explored in future research. Originality/value – The paper is one of the first systematic literature reviews to explore ...

Critical failure factors of Lean Six Sigma: a systematic literature review

The concept of design thinking (DT) has emerged in management debates as promising innovation inspired by the way designers work. Despite the growing interest in DT, it is a difficult concept to study due to the lack of coherence between what DT ‘is’ in academic and practical terms. While there are numerous normative and often process-focused depictions of DT, they seem limited in their ability to account for what occurs in practice. Given the discussion of DT as a concept, and emerging discussion of its enactment, a framing is needed that acknowledges both aspects. This paper proposes a framing of DT that makes it researchable in both theory and practice, and discusses commonalities and discrepancies in how the concept is usually portrayed in the literature. The paper builds on an empirical interview study in six large organizations, which led to the development of a framework structure and the identification of five themes characterizing DT: User focus, Problem framing, Visualization, Experimentation and Diversity. Each theme is associated with specific principles/mindsets, practices and techniques. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a framework that includes DT both as an idea and as the enactment of the idea, inspired by the works of Latour.

Framing Design Thinking: The Concept in Idea and Enactment

There is a growing need for operations management models that contribute to the continuous improvement of company processes, among them we highlight lean manufacturing, Six Sigma and, more recently, Lean Six Sigma (LSS). This article aims (1) to identify and analyse the differences and complementarities in the production decision areas for each one of the three models; (2) to identify the competitive priorities that lead to the best performance as a result of policies followed in the decision areas as a result of the adopted model. First, a theoretical conceptual model was developed based on a review of the literature, followed by a exploratory research questions applied to manufacturing companies that use the lean, Six Sigma or LSS manufacturing models in southern Brazil. The main results show that there are differences in the models in relation to the importance of the decision areas and the performance achieved in the competitive priorities. Individually, lean manufacturing, Six Sigma and LSS have vary...

Lean, Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma: an analysis based on operations strategy

Purpose – This study aims to investigate the relationship between lean practices, operations performance (OP), and business performance (BP). Design/methodology/approach – This survey-based study was a cross-sectional study. The samples were drawn by using stratified random sampling procedure from large Indonesian manufacturing companies based on the directory provided by the Data and Information Center of Indonesian Ministry of Industry with the final number of respondents of 139. Four main hypotheses were developed and tested statistically by applying multivariate data analyses. Findings – The results provided evidence that lean practices should be implemented holistically. Lean practices have a positive and significant impact on both OP and BP. Moreover, OP partially mediates the relationship between lean practices and BP. Research limitations/implications – The data used in this survey represent self-reporting by mainly the middle or top management in production. Practical implications – This study co...

Impact of lean practices on operations performance and business performance

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to analyze the critical success factors (CSFs) for lean Six Sigma (LSS) implementation and its impacts towards company performance in multinational electronic manufacturing service (EMS) industries.Design/methodology/approach – A pilot study has been conducted to identify the top ten CSFs for LSS implementation. Based on these factors, a structured questionnaire has been constructed. The questionnaire will be distributed to multi‐sites of six EMS industries to obtain the data across Malaysia and other sites globally. The target population is the LSS program implementer such as master black belts, black belts and LSS champions in the EMS industries.Findings – These EMS industries provide outsourcing platform for the original equipment manufacturing (OEM) industries to outsource their products in order to reduce operational cost. With the proposed LSS implementation success model, a practical guide of the LSS program has been implemented. The practical guide helps th...

K. Jeyaraman

Papers

A conceptual framework for critical success factors of lean Six Sigma