Six Sigma has long been used as an effective way to restructure a company’s management process. While there are abundant case study literatures on Six Sigma, a theoretical framework that can logically advance the previous work into a higher level is lacked. What’s more, there are few empirical studies to verify those results from previous case studies. To fill these two gaps, this study propose...

  Objective: As a consequence of stat turnaround times (TATs) chronically exceeding 60 minutes, our laboratory was facing pressure to divert limited resources toward the implementation of an emergency department satellite laboratory. Peer-reviewed literature in clinical laboratory quality assurance and improvement indicates that between 60-70% of errors occur at the pre-analytical level.  Thus...

In this chapter, the authors establish the existence of a synergistic relationship between two complementary methodologies, Business Process Management (BPM) and Six Sigma, through literature review and suggest methods to exploit the same. Six Sigma provides incremental improvement through its analytical abilities and is complemented by BPM which provides the data from the ongoing processes on ...

Continuous process improvement is a constant preoccupation of companies operating in strong competitive markets (Thawani, 2002; Cronemyr, 2007). The goal of process improvement projects is about increasing both efficiency and effectiveness of the business system (Brad, 2008). A widely used methodology for process improvement is Six Sigma DMAIC (Cascini et al., 2008; Hamza, 2008). Some researche...

The fast changing economic conditions such as global competition, declining profit margin, customer demand for high quality product, product variety and reduced lead– time etc. had a major impact on manufacturing industries. To respond to these needs various industrial engineering and quality management strategies such as ISO 9000, Total Quality Management, Kaizen, Just–in–time manufacturing, E...

Since 1999, DuPont has been applying the Six Sigma problem-solving methodology to a broad array of business, technical, transactional, and process problems across the corporation. One benefit of this culture change has been the way that business units approach energy efficiency. The structured Six Sigma approach, with its strong focus on statistics and data and a proven method for controlling i...

BACKGROUND Lean and Six Sigma are business management strategies commonly used in production industries to improve process efficiency and quality. During the past decade, these process improvement techniques increasingly have been applied outside the manufacturing sector, for example, in health care and in software development. This article concerns the potential use of Lean and Six Sigma in im...

Controlling the occurrence of defects is a major challenge for manufacturing organizations that are seeking to enhance their competitive position in today’s global market. This paper considers the process of screen-printing T-shirts using hydraulic and pneumatic printing machines. Several defects in the output of this printing process have been observed, especially with multi colors printing as...

This research aims at presenting a fuzzy model to evaluate and select Six-Sigma projects.  For this purpose, a model of fuzzy analytic network process (ANP) was designed to consider the relation and mutual impact among the factors. In order to evaluate the projects, nine sub-criteria were considered which were classified into three categories of business, finance and procedural ones. Also to co...