Barriers in green lean six sigma product development process: an ISM approach

In today’s competitive globalised business environment, production cost cutting is a primary issue before operation managers. As a research area, green lean six sigma (GLS) is proposed to have strategic importance in product development towards cutting costs, contributing to optimisation, and achieving sustainability. This research requirement has been realised to draw benefits out of three recent and involved approaches (green, lean and six sigma). In this research, an attempt has been made to address barriers in GLS product development (GLSPD) from an extensive literature review and from experts’ opinions towards developing a hierarchical model structuring these barriers. Twenty-one barriers have been identified and sorted from the review of literature and were then validated through discussions with experts. Relationships (contextual in nature) among these barriers have been realised during a brainstorming session. An interpretive structural modelling (ISM) technique has been utilised for developing a hierarchical model of barriers in implementing the GLSPD process in the automobile sector of India. A nine-level structural model has been deduced after application of the ISM technique, which shows ‘Competition and Uncertainty’ as the topmost output of the model and ‘Lack of Total Top Management Commitment’ as the bottom-level input to other barriers of the model. Further, MICMAC analysis has been also done to classify these barriers for better understanding; seven barriers are identified as driver barriers, nine as dependent, five barriers as linkage and no barrier as autonomous. An analysis of interdependence and interactions among these barriers may help supply chain managers reach a better understanding of barriers. Thus, managers may be helped in prioritising and managing barriers in order to gain a competitive advantage from GLS concept implementation in product development.