首页|Rethinking Six Sigma: Learning from practice in a digital age

Rethinking Six Sigma: Learning from practice in a digital age

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  • NETL
  • NSTL
  • Wiley
As scholars in the field of operations management (OM), we would like to suggest that our field fell short in terms of due diligence when transitioning from statistical process control (SPC) to Six Sigma-accepting without scrutiny, building theory around, and teaching heuristics and algorithms without recognizing its underlying statistical inaccuracies. It is our view that these incorrect heuristics and algorithms have introduced bias and inefficiencies in process improvement throughout the OM field, contributing to a disconnect between OM and knowledge development in data science more generally. We call for a return to first principles and the establishment of formal conceptual definitions for the theory and methods underlying Six Sigma. We urge the OM academic community to embrace the lessons from SPC and Six Sigma so that we prioritize our due-diligence role, beginning with a requirement that all algorithms and tools be vetted before entering our curricula and case-study repertoires, especially as we move forward into an age of big data and potentially further opaque algorithms and tools. We propose that our top journals be open to research that scrutinizes methods developed in practice, so that OM will continue to be the focal field for quality assurance-even when the "product" of a process is data.

Suzanne de Treville、Tyson R. Browning、Matthias Holweg、Rachna Shah

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Department of Operations, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Lausanne, Lausanne,Switzerland||Swiss Finance Institute, Zurich, Switzerland

Department of Information Systems and Supply Chain Management, Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas, USA

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

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2023

10.1002/joom.1284

Journal of operations management

Journal of operations management

ISSN：0272-6963
年,卷(期)：2023.69(8)
  • 31