Leadership – a critical success factor for the effective implementation of Lean Six Sigma

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to offer further insights into Lean Six Sigma deployment, highlighting the more important critical success factors (CSFs) and particularly the role of leadership in successful deployment. Identification of CSFs for Lean Six Sigma is important as it allows organisations to focus their efforts on these factors to ensure success. The study is in two parts: the first part reviews the literature on leadership, Lean Six Sigma and CSFs for continuous improvement programmes. The second part illustrates the results of a longitudinal study through the administration of a survey questionnaire and exploratory factor analysis of the answers. The results suggest that the most important and significant factors for the effective implementation of Lean Six Sigma are project management, leadership, selection of top talented people and financial accountability. Although they highlight the importance of leadership as a CSF for effective deployment of Lean Six Sigma, more research is needed to determine what type of leadership is appropriate at different stages of Lean Six Sigma programme maturity

Reducing the Scrap Rate in Manufacturing SMEs Through Lean Six Sigma Methodology: An Action Research

“…At an operational level within the manufacturing sector, the LSS model aims to clarify the process of identifying opportunities for non-value added activities, as well as reduce variability and improve the process cycle time and quality of the manufacturing process [25,[40][41][42][43][44]. This will result in some strategic benefits such as customer satisfaction, financial enhancement, higher productivity and satisfaction of employees, and more efficiency in manufacturing processes [12,27,[45][46][47][48][49][50]. Despite all of these benefits, "internal resistance", "the availability of resources", "changing business focus", and "lack of leadership" have been suggested as the greatest impediments to implement LSS in any manufacturing SME [51].…”

Introducing Lean Six Sigma to a German municipality: an action research report

“…The mayor as the top manager of the municipality was one of the main supporters of the whole Lean Six Sigma initiative. For successful change implementations though, all levels of managers have to be included and become active (Laureani and Antony, 2015, 2018a, 2018b. Regarding this aspect, very different experiences were noted in the municipality.…”

Critical Success Factors of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Saudi Arabia: Insights from Sustainability Perspective

“…In fact, the factors that determine their success have increasingly drawn the attention of scholars, practitioners, and policy makers. A review of the peer reviewed literature on critical success factors (CSFs) showed that these factors have been and continue to be the focus of many researchers in several areas, such as CSFs for business start-ups in several countries, such as China and Malaysia (Watson et al 1998;Huang et al 2011;Chong 2012;Chawla et al 2010;Omri et al 2015;Pletnev and Barkhatov 2016;Lampadarios et al 2017), total quality management Aspinwall 1999, 2000), business intelligence implementation (Olszak and Ziemba 2012), business models for sustainability of food and beverage companies in Netherlands (Long et al 2018), women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises in UAE (Gupta and Mirchandani 2018), environmental manufacturing (Jabbour et al 2018), adoption of e-commerce by SMEs in Nigeria (Agwu and Murray 2015), implementation of lean six sigma (Laureani and Antony 2018), implementation of business intelligence in SMEs in Poland (Olszak and Ziemba 2012). In a parallel bundle of the literature, scholars examined CSFs for micro, small and medium sized enterprises in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) either in general (Zamberi 2012) or in different areas like knowledge management (Migdadi 2009), e-commerce (Al-Ghamdi et al 2011;Sin et al 2016), technology transfer (Merdah and Sadi 2011), CSFs of enterprise resource planning (Aldayel et al 2011), business marketing (Sadi and Iftikhar 2011), computer technology acceptance (Al-Gahtani 2004).…”