What are the critical success factors for lean and/or six-sigma implementations in South African banks?

Abstract

Although most organisations want to improve quality and reduce costs, the deployment and implementation of continuous improvement methodologies is commonly viewed as a daunting journey. Many organisations fail to properly structure and/or support continuous improvement initiatives, which ultimately doom them to failure.

South African Banks are not adopting Lean and/or Six-sigma to the point where it is going to make any sort of significant difference to the bottom line over a significantly meaningful period of time. So where are they going wrong? Often it comes down to key issues that are not addressed effectively as part of the deployment.

The research objectives are: • The primary objective is to establish what the mission critical success factors for Lean and/or Six-sigma implementation in South African Banking are. • The secondary objective is to define a list of the sources of benefits for Lean and/or Six-sigma implementations in South African Banking. The research questions/problems to be addressed are: • What are the mission critical success factors for Lean and/or Six-sigma implementations in South African Banking? • How do South African Banks prioritise these critical success factors? • How do South African Banks that are already on the Lean and/or Six-sigma journey perform against these critical success factors? • What are the gaps between the importance’s of the critical success factors versus the banks actual performance against these, and how is this gap impacting on the benefits that the banks are experiencing? • What sources of benefits are South African Banks experiencing? • Can generic guidelines be provided to the South African Banks for successful Lean and/or Six-sigma implementation?