Selecting the Six Sigma Project: A Multi Data Envelopment Analysis Unified Scoring Framework

Mazen Arafah

The Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering & Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan.

DOI: 10.4236/ajor.2015.53011                

Abstract

The importance of the project selection phase in any six sigma initiative cannot be emphasized enough. The successfulness of the six sigma initiative is affected by successful project selection. Recently, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has been proposed as a six sigma project selection tool. However, there exist a number of different DEA formulations which may affect the selection process and the wining project being selected. This work initially applies nine different DEA formulations to several case studies and concludes that different DEA formulations select different wining projects. Also in this work, a Multi-DEA Unified Scoring Framework is proposed to overcome this problem. This framework is applied to several case studies and proved to successfully select the six sigma project with the best performance. The framework is also successful in filtering out some of the projects that have “selective” excellent performance, i.e. projects with excellent performance in some of the DEA formulations and worse performance in others. It is also successful in selecting stable projects; these are projects that perform well in the majority of the DEA formulations, even if it has not been selected as a wining project by any of the DEA formulations.

Keywords

Data Envelopment Analysis, Six Sigma Project Selection, Multi-DEA Unified Scoring Framework

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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