Implementation of Lean Six Sigma to Improve the Quality and Productivity in Textile Sector: A Case Study

The textile industry represents one of the most important economic links worldwide due to its essential generation of direct and indirect jobs, its contribution to the economy, and its ability to reinvent itself and adapt to market trends, government regulations, and the demands of interest groups. However, the textile industry is called upon to continuously improve its capacity to develop efficient, sustainable, and profitable processes in the current complex and volatile environments such as the Covid-19 pandemic, which has generated new challenges for this industry derived from confinement, restrictions trade and the slowdown of the supply chain worldwide and the subsequent reactivation of the economy. In this sense, e-commerce, the design of sustainable products and business models, the optimization of processes, and the improvement of quality have become resilience strategies to face the present and future demands of the market. Lean Six Sigma (LSS) has been proposed to address the challenge of improving productivity and quality since it allows managers to identify the factors that contribute to prolonged lead time throughout the production process. The suggested methodology follows the DMAIC cycle that began with the definition of the Project charter and the mapping of the process through a SIPOC diagram with which the manufacturing process was analyzed, and the critical variables of the process were identified. Then, the measurement system's performance was studied by analyzing essential quality and production indicators, the initial Value Stream Mapping (VSM), and capacity analysis to determine how well the process meets the requirements. Next, the potential causes that affect the performance of the process in terms of process times and quality were identified. As the next step, improvement strategies focused on reducing lead time and improving quality were designed and implemented. Subsequently, a comparative analysis was carried out with the before and after to verify the improvements' effectiveness. Finally, a control plan was established to maintain the upgrades obtained after implementing Lean Six Sigma. The proposed framework was validated through a case study of a company in the textile sector with an export profile. The results revealed that the company's average CT went from 62.5 min to 53.1 min, while the long-term sigma level increased from -3.36 to 0.41 and a decrease in the percentage of non-conforming products of 19.43% to 12.38%.