The aspect of sustainability has been widely debated in the Industrial Engineering and Operations management fields. Researchers such as Nicola Bateman (2005) and Accenture (2010) argued that many companies are doing at least one initiative of continuous improvement to make their businesses profitable by minimizing operations costs. They also eluded that companies world-wide have taken part in process improvement activities however they seem to fail in sustaining these initiatives, these arguments were based on work done in the United Kingdom and United State of America and not covering the South African (SA) perspective on the sustainability issue. This paper addresses the issue of sustainability with special attention to the work done by the South African government through agencies, such as the Automotive Industry Development Centre (AIDC) and Productivity SA, in order to ensure that manufacturing companies remain competitive to the rest of the world. The results of this study confirm that manufacturing organizations are not sustaining process improvements implemented hence not realizing the benefits of these government funded projects.