How to publish operational excellence case studies in the IJLSS: a viewpoint article

Abstract

The International Journal of Lean Six Sigma encourages the publication of papers presenting applications and cases of lean six sigma and other methodology in operational excellence. Examples include reports of green and black belt projects, cases where practitioners solved complex problems using techniques from operational excellence (e.g. Ren et al., 2022), as well as descriptions of the deployment of operational excellence or continuous improvement in a particular organization (e.g. Duggan et al., 2022) and other applications of process improvement in practice (e.g. Ahmed et al., 2022). Potentially, such publications presenting real cases and applications are a rich source of information from which scholars can study the challenges of applying and deploying theory in operational excellence in the complex and messy environment of a real organization. Many such papers submitted to this journal, however, fail to live up to that potential.The typical outline of such unsuccessful case reports is: Goal: We did an interesting project in company X. The goal was to improve a production process. Case description: We followed the DMAIC or alike roadmap accumulating in a factorial experiment or another method. From this, we identified valuable process improvements, which we subsequently implemented. Conclusions:The new process settings saved the company lots of money, i.e. yielded substantial benefits.

The implementation of Lean Six Sigma for the optimization of robotic process automation systems in financial service operations

“…Hence, we aim to contribute by identifying a new type of problem (i.e. RPA deployment optimization) for which existing operational excellence (LSS) techniques arguably are useful (Lameijer et al. , 2023b).…”

“…This paper contributes to the literature by empirically demonstrating how a new type of problem (i.e. optimization of RPA based digitalized processes) can be overcome with existing data-based operational excellence (LSS) techniques (Lameijer et al. , 2023b).…”

“…This paper contributes to the literature by empirically demonstrating how a new type of problem (i.e. optimization of RPA based digitalized processes) can be overcome with existing data-based operational excellence (LSS) techniques (Lameijer et al, 2023b). Existing research has started to address the potential value of LSS for I4.0 or alike advanced information technology implementations, predominantly by process optimization and standardization before process automation (Rossini et al, 2019).…”