An Integrated Lean Six Sigma Model for Enhancing the Competitive Advantage of Industries

Overall operational excellence is one of the prime necessities for any business organization to sustain and compete in the global market. In this concern, several continuous improvement philosophies have been implemented by companies, such as lean manufacturing, six sigma, total quality management, agile manufacturing, etc. In these, lean manufacturing and six sigma shown outstanding results. Both the approaches are effective in their own, but with time the organizations implementing these approaches separately may no longer sustain improvements (Arnheiter and Maleyeff in TQM Mag 17:5-18, 2005 [1]). This is because of the various limitations associated with each of these philosophies while implementing them on the real-life problems separately. Thus, in this paper an attempt is made to combine these two popular philosophies in such a way that the weaknesses of both the manufacturing philosophies will be overcome by an integrated lean six sigma (LSS) strategy that when implemented will give better results compared to the cases when these two philosophies are implemented individually.