A Comparative Study of the Implementation Status of Lean Six Sigma in South Korea and the UK

Fierce competition and more complex customer needs and demands have forced organisations to continuously improve their operations and the quality of their products and services. Over the last decades, two of the most popular and effective strategies used by organisations to achieve such improvements have been lean manufacturing and Six Sigma. However, as competition and costumer needs and demands evolved and increased, the quest for even more efficient operations and higher quality products and services resulted in the integration of these two strategies to form an improved approach known as Lean Six Sigma. This paper investigates and compares the implementation status of Lean Six Sigma in South Korea and the UK. To do this, an empirical and exploratory study was conducted based on the design, validation and random distribution of a survey questionnaire in various South Korean and UK industries. The data was analysed using descriptive statistics. The study results revealed that Lean Six Sigma has been more widely adopted in the UK than in South Korea and that some other operations and quality improvement strategies are also a popular choice among organisations of these two countries. The results also provide evidence about different aspects of the implementation of Lean Six Sigma in South Korea and the UK. This study offers academics, researchers and practitioners interested in Lean Six Sigma with some preliminary evidence of the adoption of this approach in two industrialised nations such as South Korean and the UK.