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1. Introduction
Today, Lean and Six Sigma are the most popular business strategies for enabling continuous improvement (CI) in the manufacturing, service and public sectors. CI is the main goal for any organisation wishing to achieve quality and operational excellence and to enhance performance (Antony et al. , 2012a; Thomas et al. , 2009). Therefore, the integration of the two approaches improves efficiency and effectiveness and helps to achieve superior performance faster than the implementation of each approach in isolation (Antony et al. , 2012a).
This interest in LSS has led to many attempts to produce a comprehensive approach to achieve CI. There are noticeable limitations in the fields of research into areas of LSS (Chakravorty and Shah, 2012; Laureani and Antony, 2012), but the benefits of applying Lean and Six Sigma in parallel are noted in many case study papers in both the manufacturing and the service sector. It is also significant that the number of available papers on LSS, though still small in comparison with other quality improvement methods, has shown exponential growth since the first papers were published in 2003. As a consequence, this paper includes research papers on both Lean and Six Sigma to take into account more failure factors for LSS.
1.1 Critical failure factors
Garg and Garg (2013) and Ganesh and Mehta (2010) have defined CFFs in term of enterprise resource planning (ERP) as " the key aspects (areas) where 'things must go wrong' in order for the ERP implementation process to achieve a high level of failure". They also have defined failure as "an implementation that does not achieve a sufficient return on investment (ROI) identified in the project approval definition". According to Al-Mashari (2001) study in ERP as well, "strategy development is critical to ERP implementation, as its absence has resulted in poor outcomes" Moreover, a number of academic papers have targeted CFFs such as the study done by Yeo (2002) in CFFs in information system (IS) project. Yeo (2002) has studied the interaction between some factors such as organisational, financial, technical, human and political factors which then these factors named CFFs for IS project. However, Yeo (2002) study did not define the term CFFs but only defined some situations when project defines as a failure....