DMAIC

DMAIC is a data-driven improvement cycle used to optimize and stabilize business processes and designs, its name an acronym for its five phases, define, measure, analyze, improve and control. It emerged as the core tool used in Six Sigma projects, though it is not exclusive to Six Sigma and can serve as a framework for other improvement efforts. In the Define phase, a team establishes the business problem, objectives, resources, scope and timeline, identifying the customer and the voice of the customer along with critical to quality factors; in Measure, the team collects data to establish a baseline against which later improvement can be judged; in Analyze, the team identifies and validates root causes, often using tools such as fishbone diagrams and other statistical methods to see how process inputs affect outputs; in Improve, the team tests and implements solutions to eliminate those root causes, sometimes using design of experiments, brainstorming, or the plan-do-check-act cycle; and in Control, the team embeds the changes and works to sustain them using control charts, standard operating procedures and ongoing benefit tracking. All five phases are required and must proceed in this order. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/