| Lean enterprise focuses on eliminating waste or non-value added activities. While six sigma targets reducing errors and variations. Both use continuous improvement and this research evaluates key continuous improvement characteristics that each approach recommends in regards to leadership, learning, and collaborating, but is often overlooked in execution. Are lean enterprise and six sigma approaches applied to drive continuous improvement? Phone interviews test this hypothesis across a population of 174 different automotive companies in nine industries. This research also evaluates these key characteristics to the methods used, benefits obtained, and industry features.;From the 86 participating companies, 60 companies did not use either lean or six sigma, while another 26 companies did and completed the full interview. Only 7.1% or 4 out of 57 companies with less than 100 to 249 employees used either approach. Participants that used lean or six sigma approaches appear to struggle with extending initiatives to include suppliers (56% or 15 out of 27) and getting employees involved and satisfied with approaches at all levels (53% or 14 out of 27), as well as other areas.;This research identifies several areas of weakness organizations experience in the execution of productivity improvement techniques, such as lean and six sigma, as well as proposes significant measures that need to be incorporated to improve the success of these approaches. Awareness with the results of this research needs to be incorporated into education and training programs, as well as these results can help prevent or improve upon the negative results that many companies have experienced with these approaches and offer some explanations on potentially why these issues occurred. |
