Six Sigma through Poka-Yoke: a navigation through literature arena

From the middle of 1980s, Six Sigma concept emerged in Motorola. Because Six Sigma implementation facilitated the companies to achieve profitability, it was implemented subsequently in many parts of the world. Six Sigma is implemented by majority of the companies situated in the world by applying DMAIC (stands for define, measure, analyse, improve and control) phases. Meanwhile, there have been reports of the failures of implementing Six Sigma programmes presumably due to the failure to consider and apply the appropriate tools and techniques. In this regard, it is to be noticed that Poka-Yoke, which is a tool that can be used to achieve zero-defect manufacturing, has the potential to support the implementation of DMAIC phases of Six Sigma. On deriving this observation, the literature navigation reported in this paper was carried out to understand the essence of Six Sigma and Poka-Yoke as well as the trend of applying Poka-Yoke in DMAIC phases. In the literature survey conducted to carry out this literature navigation, the researches on applying Poka-Yoke concept in DMAIC phases were studied by referring to the relevant research papers. It has been pointed out that the Poka-Yoke solutions suggested in these research papers were not actually implemented in real-time scenario. Hence, this article ends with a suggestion that future researchers can make efforts to actually implement Poka-Yoke technique in DMAIC phases for achieving the goals of Six Sigma.