| Summary: | Companies today constantly seek to lower costs, maintain high level of quality and improve delivery for both manufactured products and services to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. Most companies seek to achieve all this through the implementation of continuous improvement initiatives. Amongst the various continuous improvement initiatives, Lean and Six Sigma have been the most popular and widely adopted. In recent years, the term Lean Six Sigma has been used to describe a management initiative or framework that combines these two proven methodologies.
This management project is a case study research of an aviation facility in Singapore that first implemented Six Sigma in 1996, before introducing Lean and combining both initiatives together as Lean Six Sigma in 2005. Qualitative research techniques, namely semi-structured interviews and documentation, were used for primary and secondary data collection. The research findings revealed that Lean is increasingly being applied and valued at the facility, although Six Sigma tools remain dominant in projects while Lean tools are used mainly during Lean events (AWOs and Kaizens). Four challenges to Lean Six Sigma implementation were successfully identified, namely lack of employees trained in Lean, inadequate Lean training curriculum, poor planning and implementation, and lack of benefit identification.
This purpose of this research is to identify the challenges to Lean Six Sigma implementation and provide recommendations for the management’s consideration. This will allow the business to effectively improve its implementation strategy and maximise its Lean Six Sigma initiative.
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