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1. Introduction
In present business scenarios, the competitions are growing at a very fast rate, due to which it becomes tougher to control manufacturing cost, service cost, quality, productivity and customer satisfaction. The Lean, Six Sigma and synergies of both are key business strategy to enhance the quality and productivity of organizations. There is significant research information available on implementing these strategies in a sequential manner, but there is little information available in relation to integration of these approaches to attain a common goal of improvement in industries (Thomas et al., 2008). Six Sigma is well-established approach used to identify and eliminate defects/failures in business by focusing on process performance characteristics that are very critical to quality (Antony et al., 2008). Six Sigma is a statistical thinking that aims to reduce variation in any process (Chakravorty, 2009; Naslund, 2008), reduce costs in manufacturing and services, make savings to the bottom line, increase customer satisfaction (Drohomeretski et al., 2014; Shah et al., 2008; Manville et al., 2012; Naslund, 2008), measure defects, improve product quality and reduce defects to 3.4 parts per million opportunities in any organization (Lee, Wei and Lee, 2009; Chen and Lyu, 2009). This is done through powerful analytical and statistical tools and techniques such as quality function deployment, failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA), statistical process control (SPC), design of experiments (DOE), analysis of variance and Kano Model (Bhuiyan and Baghel, 2005). Lean has similar growth history like Six Sigma, and Lean development is based on Toyota Production System (TPS) (Womack and Jones, 2002; Womack et al., 2007). In 1930, this approach was developed for manufacturing cars which detach all type of waste, including non-value-added human motion. The newer approach (LSS) formed by synergies of both Six Sigma and Lean concepts, provides better results in every discipline (Allen and Laure, 2006). It was observed that Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is a powerful strategy for process management, and process excellence aims to eliminate defects and reduce variation in the process of service and product manufacturing, leading to business process excellence (Snee, 2010).
The main contribution of current study is to represent the continuous improvement with implementation of Lean Six Sigma in various industrial sectors and different challenges faced during deployment...