Footwear Industry in Bangladesh: Implementation of Six Sigma Methodology

Abstract

The increasing economic growth in Bangladesh encourages the growth of Leather sector. This condition results in an intense competition among the leather products industries particularly footwear industries which encourages companies to produce quality products in order to meet customers' satisfaction. One of the methods to control the quality is by using Six Sigma (SS). SS is a method of improving the quality towards the target of 3.4 defects per million opportunities for each production of goods and services. SS is divided into two methods, namely DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, and Control) and DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyse, Design, and Verify). It can be implemented not only for big companies but also for SMEs. This study was conducted to determine the application of quality control aspect of SS in leading export oriented footwear industry in Bangladesh using DMAIC method. By using this tool, it can be seen that the sigma value in the different production line like court shoe and oxford shoe production line are 6324 and 6300 with the possibility of error products contained are 32938 and 32814 per million opportunities respectively. In the application of SS in this study, there are various causes of defective products, namely toe lasting problems, inefficient ironing, insufficient chilling, etc.