Manufacturing Facility Performance Development: Applying Balanced Scorecard and Lean Six Sigma

Abstract

Organizations striving to be competitive, aiming at world-class operational excellence levels, attempt to adopt various improvement concepts, techniques and methodologies such as; Balanced Scorecard (BSC), Lean, Six Sigma, Total Quality Management (TQM)…etc. Unfortunately, just few of them managed to attain and sustain the desired outcome of these methodologies. The main reason for having unsuccessful implementation stories, as highlighted in the literature review section, is due to the misalignment of the ongoing improvement initiatives with the organizations’ strategy. Another reason is handling these initiatives in a project-manner “ a Flavor of the month” rather than a transformation journey for the way business is conducted, tackling not only the operating system (OS) part of the business but also the Management infrastructure (MI), mindset, behavior and capability (MBC) of the organization to have -not only- a successful implementation, but a sustainable transformation as well. Capitalizing on the successful implementation stories and building on the learned lessons from the unsuccessful ones. The main objective of this research is to develop an integration model and an implementation roadmap for combining and aligning improvement initiatives specifically Lean and six sigma with organizations’ strategies using the balanced scorecard concepts for breakthrough improvement on factory performance, management effectiveness and employees engagement. The integration model and roadmap are validated through a case study (A factory operating in the fast moving consumer goods “FMCG” industry).