A study of the effect of lean six sigma’s critical success factors in Indian SMEs

Abstract

Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) are becoming an important part of the global economy by providing huge employment opportunity and stable support to GDP growth to many of the countries. SMEs face difficulty to compete in the market with large companies and various competitors. The SMEs need to be in the market with adequate product quality with minimal price than the competitors. This makes the SMEs concentrate on quality management models. Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is a proven quality management approach that can enhance the performance of industries. The industries can improve quality by reducing the costs and variations and thus increase the profit through LSS implementation. This study is aimed at the identification of Critical Success Factors (CSF) of Indian SMEs towards LSS implementation. The study identified 9 CSFs which support the industries in implementing LSS. The study also compared the effect of these factors in industries with various classifications. This study is the initial part of the author’s research work which led to the development of a tailor-made model termed Identify-Rank-Define-Analyse-Improve-Control (IRDAIC) model and validation of the model by implementing it in SMEs.