Towards sustainability through Green, Lean and Six Sigma integration at service industry: review and framework

Abstract

In the last decades, sustainable development has increasingly gained importance to service industry and the integration between Green, Lean and Six Sigma approaches in service systems is necessary in order to balance the need for operational efficiency with environmental commitment and social fairness. Because of that, the purpose of this paper is to critically review the Lean and Lean Six Sigma (LSS) methodologies and highlight their importance to achieve sustainable services. To do this, a systematic literature review of the subjects under investigation was conducted. The study has two major contributions. First, it is one of the first researches that examine the compatibility and divergences of Green, Lean and Six Sigma concepts and implications regarding its sustainable implementation in service industry. Second, it provides a holistic Green LSS framework attempting to help practitioners to find ways of institutionalizing it in numerous kinds of services, by pointing out nine critical factors for its implementation, such as continuous customer satisfaction, ethical relations and regulatory compliance, focus on knowledge management and human behaviors, and effective Jidoka automation. The proposed framework indicates new paradigms and pathways to achieve the balance in technical, economic, social and environmental priorities in services.

Keywords

• Lean thinking
• Lean Six Sigma (LSS)
• organizational sustainability
• sustainable development
• service industry
• systematic literature review (SLR)