**4.3 Continuous improvement strategies**

Quality is becoming an increasingly important subject in organizations. It is central matter to develop a sustained resource management technique. Therefore, logistics emerges as an activity that allows the achievement of a prodigious efficiency and economic welfares and in long term it is to obtain competitive advantages of the country. However, organizations have improvement choices with time depending up on the way they track to meet their strategic and operational objectives, they can watch to its economic welfares. Science raises continuous improvement as the competence of frequent processes and schemes and is closely integrated with means of waste elimination. The customers focus programs such as total quality management, supply chain management, just-in-time and kaizen also need to be understood how to assess quality of products and systems through use of a variety of quality control tools. It is also important to understand how to interpret findings and how to correct problems. There are countless specific tools and techniques that help the industry process improvement and enhancement. Any organization needs to focus on quality of products, optimum product cost, timely delivery of products and the flexibility of their internal business process to adjust to quick fluctuations. Consequently, continuous and constant improvement tools like Kaizen, Six Sigma, ISO-9000, Lean thinking, TQM, SCM and JIT system are not new to the present situation of industrialization for achieving the above concepts. This method is not only limited to any particular industry but also to large potential benefit. It has a widespread application throughout the whole industries. Many industries have adopted it and others are going to implement for their endurance in the fast competition at each stage in each area.

## **4.4 The concepts of lean manufacturing**

Historically the lean production system is the world famous production system developed and practiced by Toyota Company for a long time [12, 13]. Though the basic ideas behind the lean manufacturing system are waste elimination, cost reduction and employee empowerment. Since this concepts leads to maximize customer value while minimizing all the wastes that come with that significance. Nevertheless, lean processes can make jobs highly repetitive while eliminating critical rest time for employees [14]. Lean is a philosophy that aims to maintain smooth production flow by continuously identifying and eliminating waste resulting in increasing value of activities in the production process [15].

### **4.5 Waste reduction and waste removal**

Through Lean Main goal of lean thinking is to reduce and remove waste. Since lean strategy is a potential tool to minimize and then remove waste so as to achieve sustainable development of manufacturing firms. Even though, the lean strategy reduction is one of the main functions of Lean Manufacturing implementation plan [15]. Since all the form of waste i.e. overproduction, defect, transportation, work in progress inventory, over processing, waiting and motion are reduced with Lean manufacturing implementation (**Figure 1**).

*Development of Integrated Lean Six Sigma-Baldrige Framework for Manufacturing Waste… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95279*

**Figure 1.**

*The seven wastes that controlled quality.*

#### **4.6 Roles of six- sigma on improvement**

Numerous companies use Six Sigma practice to achieve competitiveness of their business. Six sigma methodologies are cast-off to improve the excellence of the product and process dramatically. Sigma, σ, is a letter employed from the Greek alphabet to measure the process variability and the sigma level measured to determine the performance of the business processes [15]. The six sigma methodology was introduced by Womack et al. [16] and resulted in the accomplishment of business quality in Motorola. According to the study by Snee [17] states that six sigma concept was constructed by Bill Smith, then an engineer at Motorola who wins the 1988 Baldrige National Quality Award. The deployment of six sigma concept is led by Allied-Signal and General Electric (GE). Six-sigma is described as an improvement programmer for reducing variation. It focuses on continuous and breakthrough improvements. In research the two major improvement methodologies in six- sigma has been considered. These are already existing processes and new processes. The first methodology used to improve an existing process and can be divided into five phases [15]. These are:



**Table 1.**

*Integration of lean tools in the DMAIC framework [3].*


*Development of Integrated Lean Six Sigma-Baldrige Framework for Manufacturing Waste… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95279*


**Table 2.**

*Comparison of improvement programs [22, 23].*

### **4.7 Malcolm Baldrige national quality award**

The initiative taken to improve quality management practices and the competitiveness of U.S. firms was signed by President Ronald Reagan on Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act in 1987. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) was created to promote quality awareness, identify the requirements for quality excellence and share information about successful quality strategies and benefits [20]. The Baldrige core values and concepts includes visionary leadership management for innovation, customer-driven, excellence, management by fact, organizational and personal learning, social responsibility, valuing employees and partners, focus on results and creating value, agility systems perspective and focus on the future are the common values [21].

**Table 2** indicates the comparison of the different programs and tools. It indicates the difference and similarities the tools have so that they lead to develop the ingrate once. **Figure 2** indicates the summery of literature review with the major areas considered during the study.

#### **4.8 Literature gap**

To get enough information about the topic raised so many literatures are reviewed from different sources, among these journal articles, reports, and unpublished master thesis is the main one. During literature survey recent

**Figure 2.** *Summary of the literature review (authors).*

documents concerning waste minimization tool lean, six sigma and Malcolm baldrige quality award are collected from different sources then each document critically examined in order to filter gaps below.

