Lean Maturity Models: A Scoping Review

Abstract

The Lean Six Sigma approach has been driving several organizations worldwide through quality and performance improvement. Its implementation process is complex and success depends, besides several factors, on the organization’s current maturity level. Lean Maturity Models (LMM) can reveal guidelines to conduct organizations during the implementation process, ensuring its continuous improvement. In this context, this paper presents a Scoping Review to synthesize which are the Maturity Models (MM) already developed and understand their contributions to the successful implementation of lean approaches. The results reveal a diversity of MM being developed to assist these implementations. Most of them are hybrid models and are highly generalizable. In general, these artifacts are used to assess and indicate to organizations their lean maturity level and the points to be improved. The synthesis of existing MM in the literature presented in this paper can be a starting point for creating or adapting new models. Moreover, organizational managers can verify the existence of any replicable model to assist them in lean maturity.