Editorial

Abstract

Historically, profitability and efficiency, and more recently, customer satisfaction, quality, and responsiveness, have been the dominant concern for organisations (Green Jr. et al., 2012; Mohanty et al. 1999). In this line, ‘Lean’ and ‘Six Sigma’ have been recognised as the two most prominent strategies employed by organisations to attain operational excellence and thus achieve the aforementioned objectives. However, in order to respond to environmental regulations and the growth of customer demands for products and services that are more environmentally sustainable, companies have now been forced to rethink their objectives and how they manage their operations and processes (Garza-Reyes, 2015a). For this reason, some organisations have taken a proactive role in developing cleaner supply chains, manufacturing processes and services as well as designing environmentally sustainable products. This has given birth to the emergence of the ‘green paradigm’ as a philosophy and operational approach to improve the environmental efficiency of organisations and reduce the negative ecological impact of their products and services while still achieving their financial objectives (Garza-Reyes, 2015b). The green paradigm can be considered an initiative (Digalwar et al., 2013) that utilises methods such as environmental operations management, also known as green operations (Nunes and Bennett, 2010), reverse logistics (Sarkis, 2003), green supply chains (Sarkis, 2012), green manufacturing (Kleindorfer et al., 2005), among others, to reduce the negative environmental effect of the consumption and production of products and services (Garza-Reyes, 2015b). As lean manufacturing aims at the elimination of waste in every area of production, design, supplier network and factory management, its compatibility with the green paradigm seems logical. However, despite their primary and similar objective of fiercely targeting the reduction of waste, the green and lean relationship and their combination as an integrated approach has only recently started to be explored (Dues et al., 2013). For this reason, only few theoretical frameworks and empirical examples are available to guide and explain industrialists how to integrate green methodologies into their current lean practices (Garza-Reyes, 2015a; Dues et al., 2013), or vice versa. On the other hand, quality is more than just achieving capable and reliable processes or manufacturing products free of defects (Madu and Kuei, 1995). In this context, a system’s overall performance should not only be measured on the basis of product quality but also on the basis of environmental sustainability (Kuei and Madu, 2003). Nevertheless, very few researches have correlated the quality and green paradigms. Total quality environmental management (TQEM), a sub-development of TQM, emphasises environmental controls, in industries that are associated with environmental waste (i.e. electronic component and semiconductors manufacturing) (Sarkis, 2003; Raisinghani et al., 2005). TQEM is a method that correlates quality with green aspects. However, in the case of six sigma, there is very limited evidence of research that has investigated the relationship between six sigma and green initiatives and performance (Garza-Reyes, 2015b). This relationship requires investigation because the quality and environmental sustainability dimensions are considered mutually dependant (Kuei and Madu, 2003). This special issue (SI) of the International Journal of Lean Six Sigma (IJLSS) therefore intends to explore the synergies between the lean/six sigma and green paradigms by presenting the latest research and developments in lean and six sigma, with particular interest in their combination with the green paradigm and their contribution and impact upon creating environmentally sustainable supply chains, processes, services and products. In particular, this SI focuses on theoretical, practical, novel and original contributions investigating the combination and/or impact of the lean/six sigma strategies on environmental initiatives and performance by addressing the following questions: • How can lean and/or six sigma be effectively integrated with green strategies and initiatives to support the development, management and improvement of environmentally sustainable supply chains, processes, services and products? • How have lean and/or six sigma been employed to contribute in achieving greener supply chains, processes, services and products, and what results have been obtained? • What green-oriented theoretical frameworks, decision-support concepts, methods and tools have been proposed based on lean and/or six sigma and how have they been integrated as part of the corporate, business or functional strategies of organisations? • How can organisations align, adapt and deploy lean/six sigma strategies to effectively respond to and support the current environmental challenges without jeopardising their business success? • How can lean/six sigma aid organisations to balance the need for operational excellence and profit gains with that of environmental compliance? • What empirical evidence exists of the application of lean/six sigma to improve the environmental performance of organisations?