A systematic literature review on Sustainable Lean Six Sigma Current status and future research directions Pranay Sureshbhai Parmar and Tushar N. Desai Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, India Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this study is to determine the current status of Sustainable Lean Six Sigma (SLSS) practices execution in the industries by identifying the research gaps and also methodologies that are applied by different researchers and practitioners. Design/methodology/approach – To find the current status of SLSS practices all over world, the literature review of the articles available through SCOPUS data base is given in different categories such as a country-wise and year-wise publication of the articles, journal-wise publication of articles, case study implementation focus in industry and data analysis techniques used by the researchers. Findings – The different methodologies applied by the researchers and practitioners have been explained and the gaps for further research are identified. The extensive review of articles of last 18 years revealed that there are various opportunities such as quantitative study, framework modeling on the SLSS, and implementation of developed models in different industries, etc. which are required to be explored. Originality/value – In the present study, a review of 129 articles for the time span of January 2000 to February 2018 is considered. The SCOPUS database was used for selecting the articles for review. A total of 129 articles were considered for the literature review, and the case study implementation in different industries with the focused areas such as cost reduction, defect reduction, economic, environmental and social aspects was explained. Keywords Six Sigma, Systematic literature review, Sustainability/sustainable development, Sustainable Lean Six Sigma, Lean, Lean Six Sigma Paper type Literature review 1. Introduction The globalization of business has made organizations work for world-class level quality of their products and services. The organizations which have adopted strategies such as Lean Six Sigma are concerned about quality and productivity of their products/services and their value in the competitive market (AlSagheer, 2011). Nowadays, because of the effect of global warming and environmental degradation all over the world, it has become very important for the organizations to consider the factors related to the environmental effects of their each and every action of production (Cherrafi et al., 2017a, 2017b; Kumar et al., 2015). The government policies, stakeholders pressure and competitive environment of the world-class organization made organizations conscious about the consideration of the environmental factor in their operations (Wong and Wong, 2014; Garza-Reyes, 2015a, 2015b). The organizations have correspondingly started to consider the factors allied to employees’ support for the better work environment, but it has been found at the initial level only (Corbett and Klassen, 2006; Powell et al., 2017; Ruben et al., 2017a, 2017b, 2017c). Hence, to survive in this cut-throat competitive market, either in manufacturing or service organization, the only way for the organization is to integrate social and environmental Sustainable Lean Six Sigma 429 Received 31 August 2018 Revised 6 March 2019 15 June 2019 Accepted 21 September 2019 International Journal of Lean Six Sigma Vol. 11 No. 3, 2020 pp. 429-461 © Emerald Publishing Limited 2040-4166 DOI 10.1108/IJLSS-08-2018-0092 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/2040-4166.htm