Implication of Lean Six Sigma

In
Higher Education Sector

Muhammad Seerat bin Zubair 2016352

 Implication of Lean Six Sigma
In
Higher Education Sector

Name: Muhammad Seerat bin Zubair

Reg No: 2016352
Course: Production Management (MS-326)
Submission Date: 2nd May, 2019

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 Table of Contents

Abstract 3

Introduction 3
Background 3
Challenged and Limitations of Lean Six Sigma 4
Purpose of the Study 5

Literature Review 6
Six Sigma 6
Lean 7
Lean Six Sigma 8
Lean Six Sigma in Higher Education Sector 8

Methodology 9

Discussion 10
Curriculum Delivery 10
Business and Supporting Services 11
Admission and Marketing 11
Research 12

Conclusion 13
References 14

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 Abstract
This study is conducted on the basis of previous researches and is considered as a secondary
research with the discussion how Lean Six Sigma approach has been able to modify the
manufacturing process not only in the product and service sector but also the Higher
Education context. The purpose of this study is to identify the opportunities that are available
for the Educational Institutes in order to maximise their productivity and hence improve the
quality standards of education. This paper will provide how the focus on some missing aspects
of Higher Education system are hindering the growth of the sector and provide solutions to
it. The limitations of the study were regarding the techniques that are bound to be applied in
the Educational institutes and their experimental aspects are to be judged by the potential
researchers which have the opportunity to realise the importance of this sector.

Introduction

Background

The increasing Supply Chain development and improvement in the process enhancement has
been a thing of the recent decade. The backbone of Supply Chain Management, Lean Six
Sigma is considered as the foremost high quality technique in order to produce and
manufacture efficiently. With the passing time, there have been serious development on the
implications of Lean Six Sigma and its methods on every possible industry. The application
does not limit the consultant just in the manufacturing industry but also have a lot of
involvement in the service oriented sectors. The existing economic environment demands the
extensive work to be done in almost every industry in order to stay in the competition.

The education institution being one of the most important and demanding sector requires a
lot of continuous improvement too. The increasing expenses, escalating costs and declining
revenue streams is considered to be an unforgiving problem in the education sectors whether
it might be public or private. (Benjamin, 2017). With these existing problems the usage,
modification for the education sector and its implication is a good way to encounter such
problems and bring forward the solutions which will not only benefit the institutions financial
statements but also the students would get to receive far better facilities and education
standards. (J.K., 2007). There are two main demanding and concerned factors in the higher

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education sector which exist to plunder the financial systems of the university. One being the
students’ curriculum and the other importance of faculty administration where they get to
receive funds and investments by the fundraisers. The approach of Lean Six Sigma and its
application could benefit such sides of the areas in higher education sector.

Challenges and Limitations of Lean Six Sigma in Higher Education Sector

The concept of Lean Six Sigma is mainly implemented in the manufacturing sector and
services too but in the area of Higher Education and Universities very few researchers have
passed through this area and justify the implementation of Lean Six Sigma approach for the
betterment of educational institutes. Following are the most vital barriers and challenges that
are faced while the implication of Lean Six Sigma in Higher Education atmosphere: (Antony &
Krishan, 2012)

 The idea of providing the Six Sigma and Lean concepts from the manufacturing and
service industry in Education sector, the applications are not same at all and the
results outcome is different. Terminologies have a problem to adjust from their origin
and set up at a d different environment.
 The Supply Chain models and specifically Lean Six Sigma work in the specific processes
and in isolation while the Higher Education sector demands and works in a network
and systems. All of these Lean Six Sigma cannot be directly implemented with the
previous researches but however needs special techniques in order to improve the
quality.
 Considering the awareness of Lean Six Sigma approach in non-manufacturing industry,
the application of Six Sigma and leanness is not if much importance to senior
executives because they do not understand the implication of it in the University
sector or even schools.
 The idea of Lean and Six Sigma applies throughout the whole organisation and it
cannot be done with the involvement of stakeholders in that specific sector. So the
realisation for staff, faculty and students for achieve such targets is difficult to
integrate.
 The implication of Lean approach takes time and proper management decisions in
order to better the outcome of it. Fast and effective cost cutting and lower expenses

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 cannot be expected within a very short time so several managers come to the
conclusion of this approach as another management failure. (Jones, 2005).
 In the Higher Education context the process oriented structure is not useful because
it requires the complete mind-set to change the setting of organisation and create a
more diverse set of techniques. However, the Education sector require more
prominent and focused procedures or activities but not the process.
 The vision of achieving the lean six sigma approach requires more trust, dedication
and transformational leadership to create better and efficient outcomes. It also needs
to meet the desired communication level among the organisation which in Higher
Education sector is difficult to achieve.
 The requirement of resources for the Lean Six Sigma techniques require a good
amount of resources which does not much exist for the employees of Higher
Education Sector and specially the public institutes.
 The biggest of limitations in applying the Lean Six Sigma approach is that weak
channels of continuous improvement. The requirement planning of strategic goals and
their implementation gets in the way of poor planning which gets more difficult in
Education Sector.

Purpose of the Study

The objective of this study to identify the importance of Lean Six Sigma and its implication on
the Higher education sector through finding the resource gap on previous researches and
provide the solution to those problems identified. The approach of using Lean Six Sigma in
the Higher Education context is to identify the concept that determines the right use of
resources to create more opportunities for implementing Supply Chain concepts and
specifically Lean Six Sigma in Higher Education Institutes. This study will provide the long term
research and improvement construct for Universities, Colleges and High Schools which proves
to be useful for the Education Institutes for long term success. This approach also considers
the change in environment and cultural factors of the institutes which helps the sector to
create more opportunities for continuous improvement. This also promotes the following
educational institutes to implement the Lean Six Sigma techniques depending on their current
conditions which brings towards the idea of expanding this approach in the Higher Education
context and bring more diversification in the already-complex sector.

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 Literature Review

The theory of Lean Six Sigma has been developed over the years where the researchers have
followed a guideline to conduct, control and experiment the Lean Six Sigma techniques in
different kind of organisations. In contrast to the usage of Lean Six Sigma in Higher Education
Studies there has been a very limited form of research due to the extensity of data and
application motivation by the administration of different institutes. (Anothony & Svensson,
2014). However the literature discussion would be to provide an overview of Six Sigma
approach, then the development of Lean program, how lean six sigma came into the existence
and finally how these approach have been under consideration by researches in the gravity
of Higher Education.

Six Sigma

Since the start of 1980, Motorola realising their problems in the process and in order to
improve their efficiency conceptualised the Six Sigma approach and its mastermind being Bill
Smith who was supported by the Chief Executive Officer of Motorola Robert Galavin by
implementing his strategies in the company. This ended up being a great success which was
followed by the General Electric in 1990’s who focused on the quality improvement of their
products by creating more space of the manufacturing process and capacity planning. (Brady
& Allen, 2006). In order to achieve higher number of quality enhancements and planning,
there has been work done on Total Quality Management too with the help of Six Sigma
concepts which has been developed by renowned enterprises in order to have more efficiency
in their products and stay competitive in the market. (Barney, 2002). The summary of Six
Sigma is conceptualised in the word, DMAIC. This is the further application of quality control
technique used in order to implement Six Sigma approach in the company. (Pande P.S, et al.,
2000). The step for the quality improvement process, DMAIC are:

 (D) Define: It means to identify your customers and targeting them by knowing their
wants and needs.
 (M) Measures: This step is to measure the customer satisfaction with the statistical
calculation of differentiating the process development and quality improvement.

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  (A) Analyse: In this step the data collected and calculated will be analysed by using
Ishikawa analysis, Pareto charts or many other techniques in order to know the
relation between different variables.
 (I) Improve: The modification process is required here in order to keep the processing
system strong enough to lead the product quality.
 (C) Control: This process is very important for sustainability for the production
processes and keep the system intact for the continuous improvements.

Lean

After the World War II, when Japan was re-building its economy, Taiicho Ohno, the pioneer
of Toyota lean production system started their motor production with the least amount of
resource but yet keeping the focus on quality management. But these concept are basically
described by (Womack & Jones, 1996). With the increasing interests over the time for
practical implications of how lean approach has helped the industry came the concept of Just
in Time (JIT) which focuses on the inventory management. (Pepper & Spedding, 2010). Waste
reduction is the shine of applying Lean manufacturing where all kinds of wastes are reduced
in order to achieve the lean production system. These waste in the system are:

 Excess production
 Over powering the inventory
 Incomplete processing
 Transportation wastage
 Number of defects per set of opportunities
 Time wastage
 Unnecessary lead time (Womack & Jones, 1996).

Other than the wastage reduction, Lean also explain the implication through following the 5’S
technique which according to (Bicheno, 2010) is the best way to achieve the lean business
production in every sector. Those 5’S are: Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize and Sustain.
(Pepper & Spedding, 2010)

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Lean Six Sigma

After the separate discussion of Lean approach and Six Sigma, the study comes towards the
integration of both concepts form up the Lean Six Sigma technique where the processes in
manufacturing and service industry is achieved according to the needs. (Sheridan, 2000). The
application of Lean is empowered over several organisations because of its importance but
Six Sigma is the approach which cannot be easily implemented and a count full of
organisations are able to do although both of them complement each other and without lean
concept, Six Sigma approach cannot be applied. (Higgins, 2005). (Pepper & Spedding, 2010)
Have conceptualised the artistic measures of applying Lean Six Sigma approach in the
organisations by empowering the process management and with the least amount of
wastage. Their work has been in the idea of improving the already existing quality control and
to make sure that sustainability is achieved by processing throughout the organisations. The
authors believe that overall Lean Six Sigma should be considered as the more innovative way
to implement rather than sticking on to the Lean and Six Sigma approach separately.

Lean Six Sigma in Higher Education

The past two decades have been entirely focused on how to improve the Quality Education
entirely at the organisation and the implementation of the Total Quality Management
techniques. With the increasing problems of higher expense and lower revenue streams the
administration should move towards the betterment of the organisational structure by
implementing Lean Six Sigma (Bandyopadhyay & Lichtman, 2007). Institutions have faced
several decision making problems along with the empowered resistance towards the change
management, which has led to the poor administration handling of problems. (Quinn, et al.,
2009). The organisations should be ready before they are to see an improvement in the
overall management and that is why (N. & Kumar, 2012) believe that implementation of Lean
Six Sigma techniques in Higher Education Institutes can be of very difficult procedures and
would require overall change in attitude towards the work. This study is however based on
the factors that are identified as a resource gap for further research on how to implement the
Lean Six Sigma approach on the Higher Education Institutions. (James & Bruce, 2015):

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 Methodology

Considering the nature of the study, the research is completely a qualitative one. There has
been a systematic review on the previous literature available on the approach of Lean Six
Sigma in Education Sector. The study has been conducted by the means of Secondary data
and provisions of the theoretical work that has been done so far in this industry. Due to the
limitations and barriers that exist in the Education market, not much reliable revision is
present qualitative wise because most of the education institutes lack the idea of applying
Lean Six Sigma approach in their respected sectors.

The research was carried out by using Research Gate and Google Scholar where already
existing Research Papers were extracted from the timings of 2000 till 2019. The Journals
preferred are:

 International Journal of Lean Six Sigma

 International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management
 Total Quality Management and Business Excellence
 International Journal of Quality and Reliability Management

The keywords that were identified and used were ‘Lean’ ‘Six Sigma’ ‘Higher Education
problems’ ‘Non-manufacturing industries’ and ‘Quality Improvement’. In total 20 research
papers have been used in order to conduct this study in reference to those papers. The
purpose of these keywords to enhance the boarders of research by bring more relatable
articles under the shadow of this study and use them for our purposes. The importance of
knowing that this industry does not fall under the category of manufacturing so the
applications of Lean Six Sigma approach is very difficult due to its limitations in implications.
However, some researchers have keenly worked on it in order to create more opportunities
for the educational institutes and carried out the studies to implement the ideology of Lean
Six Sigma in such institutions. Different theories and concepts have been merged together in
order to create the differentiation and novelty of this study by focusing on the factors that
can affect the overall performance of Higher Education Institutes if implemented well enough.
The systematic study brings the effect of merging previous work, that has been done related
to the topic, into the category of providing more direct solutions for the institutes to follow.
The references at the end of article are mentioned which were used to consult for this study.

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 Discussion

This section of the study will describe each and every hypothesis on the base of previous
researches and create the link of resulting up to the Higher Education Performances. In order
to have more clarity it would provide the extensive research on carrying out the processes by
the universities in order to bring more changes to their system by implementing Lean Six
Sigma approach in the following variables:

Curriculum Delivery:

Since the previous decade the increasing globalisation and enhancement in technology has
changed the college or university degree to a great extent. This way, more diversity and better
usage of information technology has affected the outcome of students on behalf of their
institutes. But however, as much as the administration stick to the traditions and do not
follow up the changing environment, the problems would seem to exist. The long standing
credit-hour system proves to be suitable for faculty as well as the administration but not very
much flexible for students (Thomas, et al., 2017). The applicants and the tuition fee system
might agree to this process and standards but for the students it get limited for them as they
are not able to focus on great many things in order to stay productive. Moreover, the process
of academics and allocation of resources. Lean and Six Sigma are the very few of the approach
which can be used to meet the scope of these problems. The first step for the administration
to realise their primary and secondary customers to make the student’s path as easy as
possible in order to create an efficient system.

 By using Lean Six Sigma the actual placements in graduate section and employments
can be measured for the data purposes.
 Deploying the source for linkages to avoid a monotonous in graduate section and
focusing on the secondary customers who would be the students working in the
organisation or studying the graduates program.
 The introduction of different innovative modules which makes the customers focus on
their critical thinking process and delivering further.

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Lean and Six Sigma could be used in order to analyse the students’ situation and the rate of
errors they make. This way the reduction in poor performance can be foreseen and the focus
on their competency can affect the overall outcome. By this analysis, even the students’
performance can be forecasted for a specific exam by using the right techniques which can
be lead to the learning capacity of the students.

Business and Supporting Services:

With the increasing expenditures on institute’s shoulders and depleting revenue stream,
there are several things that needs foremost important attention regarding the betterment
of overall business structure (Cudney, et al., 2018). The intuition of handling the business itself
and fill the gaps created by several outcomes that may result in the probability of developing
their business structure. This application eventually will help the Higher Education Sector and
its performance on the basis of different techniques that have been used.

 Processing the tuition fee time and deadlines by creating an intelligent way using
information technology. This would create accounts more timely and appropriate
without any delays.
 Lean Six Sigma could be used in order to fetch out the payment policies and creating
the perfect blend of tuition fees on price confrontation.
 Using the Lean approach in order to lower the expense by the reduction of wastes and
consumption across the institutes and act upon to gain efficiency on practical grounds.
 The Six Sigma approaches for the product verification, procurement and supplier
grounds while spending the resources on institute’s products.
 Handling the supporting and secondary services according to the requirements and
not the unnecessary Human Resource expenses, for example; House, Food, Medicals
or security.

Admissions and Marketing:

The attraction of students toward the specific institute is what drags most of the cream and
make the outcome as a prestigious school one. The continuity in induction of fresh students
who have the required intellectual is what keeps the institute on their top line but when such
problems occur where the options available of accepting the lists of students who had the
institute as not their top priority then marketing of the education context needs to improve.

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Considering the current economic environment the enrolment process of cream in higher
education sector has decreased because of poor marketing strategies and weak admission
process which still follows the traditional procedures.

 The ratio of spending the money in marketing per student should be able enough to
identify how Lean Six Sigma has been able to help the institutes in the formation of
strong angles of studying the admission process by analysing the amount of resources
they are spending on a student. (Lu, et al., 2017).
 The withdrawal of students dropping from the institute is also an issue for the sector
of Higher Education because that stops another revenue stream in order to keep the
situations intact. Lean Six Sigma can be applied to measure and analyse the retention
programs and calculate how to resist such measures of students dropping out because
of the forecasted reasons.
 Lean Six Sigma would also impact the resource allocation process of the Admissions
and Enrolment process due to its intensive involvement of open ended administration
who would be working together for the same objective. The top management, faculty
administration and staff all would be working under the same umbrella and objective
to create a better atmosphere for the marketing process.

Research

The main and most important feature of the institutes is the research programs and its
promotion as whole which always ends up to the benefit of the Higher Education sector and
country’s academia. The researches can be used to gain a far better structure of revenue
streams by using the innovative ideas on the forums. Using Lean Six Sigma would prove that
that it brings a major impact on the education standards and their performance. Lean Six
Sigma can help the Higher education context in the following way:

 The implications of Lean Six Sigma can enable the research process more efficient by
guiding the researchers the importance of it and how the use of techniques can
benefit their researches and the higher education sector itself.
 Lean Six Sigma approach can be used as the customer target technique by making the
investors and government the ‘customers’ by beneficiating the research process. This

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 would involve the usage of resources very effectively and efficiently because the idea
of lean six sigma would be helping in achieving this target.
 The matrix concept for faculty for promoting them to work in the active and innovative
research would help create another benefit because through Lean Six Sigma, the
wastage of unnecessary time and application of improving the quality of research
facility would dramatically and positively affect the performance of Higher Education.

Conclusion

This study provides the importance of Lean Six Sigma and how it can be implemented in order
to achieve the maximum targets of Higher Education Institutes performance and their
education standards. Although this being of secondary importance, such techniques tend to
focus entirely on the processes and how the efficiency can be improved by obtaining
sustainability. The implementation of Lean Six Sigma is one thing but equating it till the end
is another difficult task. This approach of applying Supply Chain Models, specifically Lean Six
Sigma has a lot of potential to prove it as a successful aspect but it requires more extensive
researches and conceptualisation to make it as a primary procedure for the Educational
institutes. It can help the public and private sector both.

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