Relevance Of Barriers Research Articles

Relevance of Barriers for Six Sigma Implementation in Industrial Organizations

Six sigma offers several benefits to organizations, but its implementation is frequently inhibited by numerous barriers for which there is no clear classification based on their relevance order in the literature. Moreover, there are few studies regarding the relevance of these barriers in relation to Brazilian organizations. Thus, this research aimed to identify and classify the main barriers to six sigma implementation in their order of relevance and to test if some organizational characteristics can change this classification. A survey was conducted by sending a questionnaire to 95 of the 473 Brazilian organizations in the automotive sector associated with the National Association of Auto Parts Manufacturers and 40 responses were obtained. The survey revealed that for the organizations analyzed, the most relevant barrier is the lack of skill and adequate training for implementing six sigma. It also showed that organizational characteristics, such as size or breadth (multinational or national) can influence the order of relevance of the barriers. This study is relevant due to its attempt to identify the main barriers that inhibit six sigma implementation and to order them by their level of relevance. This is important so that organizations that are in the process of implementing or want to implement six sigma can either deal with them or make efforts to overcome them.

Relevance of barriers and facilitators in the use of health technology assessment in Colombia

Objectives: Several studies, mostly from developed countries, have identified barriers and facilitators with regard to the uptake of health technology assessment (HTA). This study elicited, using best-worst scaling (BWS), what HTA experts in Colombia consider to be the most important barriers and facilitators in the use of HTA, and makes a comparison to results from the Netherlands.Methods: Two object case surveys (one for barriers, one for facilitators) were conducted among 18 experts (policymakers, health professionals, PhD students, senior HTA-researchers) from Colombia. Seven respondents were employees of the national HTA agency Instituto de Evaluación Tecnológica de Salud (IETS). In total, 22 barriers and 19 facilitators were included. In each choice task, participants were asked to choose the most and least important barrier/facilitator from a set of five. Hierarchical Bayes modeling was used to compute the mean relative importance scores (RIS) for each factor, and a subgroup analysis was conducted to assess differences between IETS and non-IETS respondents. The final ranking was further compared to the results from a similar study conducted in the Netherlands.Results: The three most important barriers (RIS >6.00) were “Inadequate presentation format”, “Absence of policy networks”, and “Insufficient legal support”. The six most important facilitators (RIS >6.00) were “Appropriate timing”, “Clear presentation format”, “Improving longstanding relation”, “Appropriate incentives”, “Sufficient qualified human resources”, and “Availability to relevant HTA research”. The perceived relevance of the barriers and facilitators differed slightly between IETS and non-IETS employees, while the differences between the rankings in Colombia and the Netherlands were substantial.Conclusion: The study suggests that barriers and facilitators related to technical aspects of processing HTA reports and to the contact and interaction between researchers and policymakers had the greatest importance in Colombia.