Prioritisation of operations improvement projects in the European manufacturing industry

Louis Kirkham, Jose Arturo Garza-Reyes*, Vikas Kumar, Jiju Antony

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    39 Citations (SciVal)
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)5323-5345
    Number of pages23
    JournalInternational Journal of Production Research
    Volume52
    Issue number18
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished (VoR) - 17 Sept 2014

    Funding

    IAEA (2006) suggests that the deployment of an improvement approach that strongly emphasises project prioritisation is likely to increase the chance of success of operations improvement projects. One of these improvement approaches is Six Sigma. The fundamentals of Six Sigma are to create a well-structured, methodical and project-based approach towards process improvement (Van Iwaarden et al. 2008; Garza-Reyes et al. 2014). Thus, since Six Sigma is a project driven methodology, it emphasises the prioritisation of improvement projects to maximise financial benefits (Ingle and Roe 2001; Coronado and Antony 2002). Antony (2006) states that the correct selection and prioritisation of projects is a key critical success factor in a Six Sigma programme, which suggests that organisations adopting this improvement approach are likely to use objective project prioritisation methods. This is supported by the results of a survey carried out by Bañuelas et al. (2006), which targeted large UK organisations implementing Six Sigma. The study found that almost all Six Sigma organisations in the study use at least one objective method for project prioritisation, with the most common being CBA and Pareto analysis, both of which are tools of Six Sigma (Sharma and Chetiya 2010).

    Keywords

    • improvements prioritisation

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