Six Sigma Literature: A Review and Agenda for Future Research

Abstract

Like quality management in general, Six Sigma has penetrated into most sectors of today's business world. Although Six Sigma originated in industry, it has inspired a considerable amount of academic literature. This paper reviews this literature describing the trends, sources, and findings. The paper also seeks to synthesize the literature, with an emphasis on establishing its relationship to quality management theory and topics for future research. In doing so, there is an attempt to answer the following fundamental questions. (i) What is Six Sigma? (ii) What are its impacts on operational performance? (iii) What roles can academics usefully play in relation to Six Sigma?

Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Six Sigma in Service Organizations

“…Benefits-wise, these are mostly expressed in financial terms and not much is published about the benefits in process improvement terms. The literatures (Brady and Allen, 2006;Inozu et al, 2006;Mortimer, 2006;Antony et al, 2005a;Dudman, 2005;Goel et al, 2005;Hensley and Dobie, 2005;Basu, 2004;McAdam and Evans, 2004;Schimdt and Aschkenase, 2004;Hill and Kearney, 2003;Sehwall and De Yong, 2003;Rucker, 2000;Hahn et al, 1999;Harry and Schroeder, 1999;Paul, 1999) on Six Sigma application in manufacturing or services discuss mainly about CSFs, CTQs, KPIs and STTs. The following section provides an overview of these factors.…”

“…Finally, some authors have called for theoretic research (Nonthaleerak and Hendry, 2008;Schroeder et al, 2008;Oke, 2007;Brady and Allen, 2006), as too much research is focused only on description of practice rather than o n t h e o r y d e v e l o p m e n t t h a t i s o f u s e t o practitioners as well as academics.…”

“…This initial success of Six Sigma has seen its implementation spreading in several other organizations mostly in mass-manufacturing sector (McAdam et al, 2005). These organizations adopted the systematic framework of Six Sigma through training and project management practices (Brady and Allen, 2006). The use of Six Sigma has been relatively high among many western organizations till now, see, for example, Inozu et al (2006), Raisinghani et al (2005), and Antony (2004b), but there exists a diversity of opinion among researchers regarding the actual benefits of Six Sigma.…”

Tratamento de água para abastecimento humano: contribuições da metodologia Seis Sigma

“…A metodologia Seis Sigma é amplamente discutida na literatura internacional. Inúmeros autores buscaram avaliar e compreender os conceitos, as ferramentas utilizadas e as aplicações, bem como os benefícios, as dificuldades, as limitações, os obstáculos, os fatores críticos de sucesso e as perspectivas futuras, destacando-se Kwak e Anbari (2006), Linderman et al (2003), Koch et al (2004), Schroeder et al (2008, Brady et al (2006), Raisinghani et al (2005), Antony et al (2007), Coronado e Antony (2002), Nonthaleerak e Hendry (2008) e Goh (2002). No que tange à gestão, ao reúso e à redução do consumo de água, poucas pesquisas foram realizadas, dentre as quais destacam-se as de Sadraoui et al (2010), Tsonis et al (2011) e Kaushik e Khanduja (2008, 2009.…”

Some Practical Issues in the Application of Lean Six Sigma to Service Systems

“…Six Sigma had its origin in the manufacturing industry in the 1980s, and has since been adopted by many organizations by virtue of its effectiveness in deploying data-based tools and statistical thinking (Goh (2002); Brady and Allen (2006)). Subsequently, its extensions Design for Six Sigma or DFSS and Lean Six Sigma -for example Tennant (2002), George (2002), Tang et al (2006), and Watson(2007) -have gain considerable popularity with their promises of built-in performance during the design stage and efficiency and productivity during the production stage.…”