Selection of Lean and Six Sigma projects in industry

Abstract

Purpose -Although there is a considerable body of literature regarding the selection of improvement projects, little of it reveals what actually occurs in industry. To answer this question the authors aimed to determine how industry selects Lean and Six Sigma projects in practice. Design/methodology/approach -Practitioners of Lean and Six Sigma were surveyed to ascertain the methods and criteria that are used to select projects as well as their attitudes towards these approaches. Findings -This paper reveals: significant practitioner dissatisfaction with the approaches used; a gap between strategy formulation and portfolio generation; and that organizations generally use subjective or unstructured approaches and seldom apply the approaches that are advocated in the literature. Practical implications -Improved linkage from strategy to portfolio ought to lead to better project outcomes and longevity of the methodology. There are opportunities for better translation of the state of the art to industrial application. Originality/value -This paper presents a relatively large sample set (n ¼ 74) that reflects practitioner views on the state of practice in selecting Lean and Six Sigma projects and portfolios.

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

“…• Project management: for Lean Six Sigma deployment to be successful, it is important to work on projects aligned to the business strategy, so as to show immediate value to the organisation at large. Accurate data-driven tracking of projects is necessary to ensure deployment stays on track, as well as reward success among employees (Duarte, Montgomery, Fowler, & Konopka, 2012;Kornfeld & Kara, 2013).…”

Prioritisation of operations improvement projects in the European manufacturing industry

“…Kumar et al (2009) comments that although AHP is a well documented decision-making initiative, it is still at its inception. The study conducted by Kornfeld and Kara (2013b) further supports this, showing that only 4 percent of the respondents had adopted AHP for decision-making in Six Sigma organisations. Kumar et al (2009) and Breyfogle et al (2001) suggest that the use of objective project prioritisation methods would likely result in higher success rates of improvement initiatives than when employing subjective methods.…”

“…Questions were devised based upon past studies from Banuelas et al (2006), Kornfeld and Kara (2013b), Marriott et al (2013), Antony et al (2005) and Antony et al (2007), and were designed to test the hypotheses and answer the research questions of the study. The questionnaire consisted of two main sections with a maximum of thirteen questions (see Appendix 1 for details), this was dependent upon the responses.…”

“…It also identified the most popular tools for improvement projects prioritisation in Slovenia. Kornfeld and Kara (2013b) also carried out a study of this type, but it mainly included Australian and some few global companies. The study results showed, among other things, that practitioners were dissatisfied with the prioritisation methods used, there is a gap between portfolio generation and strategy formulation, and that companies generally use subjective or unstructured approaches.…”

Accomplishment Index Analysis of the Sociophysical Activities of Community-Based Organizations in a Postconflict Area of Africa

“…Thus, Clogg and Shihadeh (1994) and Agresti (2002) contended that only nonparametric statistical analyses should be used to process data with ordinal scales and Kuzon, Urbanchek, and McCabe (1996) believed that deviation from this will lead to committing one of the terrible "sins" of statistical analysis. The works of Wilson, Wainwright, Stehly, Stoltzfus, and Hoff (2013) and Kornfeld (2013) were recent compliance to this school of thought. These scholars' position is understood because Dolnicar and Grun (2007) noted that the user-friendliness and malleability of scale formats are not yet popular and are not well researched into.…”