What is DMAIC?
Sometimes in the business world we hear jargon that goes in one ear and out the other. “DMAIC" (pronounced “duh-may-ik”) is a good example. Especially because of how powerful DMAIC can be for improving your work efforts.
In short, “DMAIC” is a data-driven problem-solving approach involving incremental refinements and optimizations to products, designs, and processes.
What does DMAIC stand for?
Quite simply, this acronym stands for “Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.”
Motorola engineer Bill Smith created DMAIC in the 1980s as part of the Six Sigma methodology, which relies on measurement and analysis to make operations as efficient as possible. Its goal? Process improvement.
What are the different phases of the DMAIC process?
Smith designed DMAIC’s five interconnected steps or “phases” to have a cumulative effect: Build on information and data generated in previous stages and iterate upon your discoveries.
Define
The DMAIC “Define” phase establishes what the problem is and what you need to solve it. Sounds obvious, but this part of the process—stating the issue, goal, and scope necessary to achieve it—is crucial.
By defining, you’ll learn which elements are critical to quality, or “CTQs.” Team leaders and project managers usually develop a SIPOC diagram (SIPOC stands for “Suppliers; Inputs; Process; Outputs; Customers) for their team or project charter document.
Measure
Comprehend the problem? Great! Let’s outline how you’re going to measure and observe the changes you make to it. The purpose of the DMAIC “Measure” phase is to
- establish your existing process performance
- determine which data you’ll analyze
From there, you can use a data collection plan to monitor your performance as you make changes and to compare results at the end of the project.
Analyze
You should now have a baseline of data you can use to start making process-related decisions. Congrats! Welcome to the Analyze phase of the DMAIC process, where you study that data.
You and your team will build a current process map using the data to understand where the issues in your existing process began.
There’s no need to use one of the complicated Six Sigma tools, either: Fishbone diagrams and Pareto charts are perfectly sufficient, commonly used methods for conducting root cause analysis.
Once you’ve identified several root causes, involve your team to help determine the focus of your DMAIC process moving forward.
Improve
It’s time to start making actual process improvements. During the “Improve” phase of DMAIC, work with your team to find creative solutions to implement and measure. Brainstorming and having effective meetings are critical. Once you have solutions in mind, you’ll need to test, fail-proof, and implement them. Plan-Do-Check-Act or “PDCA” cycles are a common method for this, as is Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, or “FMEA,” to anticipate possible issues. Finally, create a detailed implementation plan to guide how you fix existing process issues.
Control
The last step in DMAIC should help you verify and sustain the success of your solution. In the Control phase of DMAIC, your team creates—you guessed it—a control plan. This helps your team continually reassess the impacts of implemented process changes.
You should also create a response plan to act upon in the event that performance begins to fall again. Being able to look back on how you conducted improvements and which solutions you made can be invaluable. In these moments, having proper documentation and version control on the improvement process is vital.
Word to the wise: If you’ve already heard of DMAIC, you may have heard of a different initial step, known as the Recognize phase. It’s a minor semantic distinction—the two are essentially identical.
PDCA vs DMAIC vs DMADV: What’s the difference?
DMAIC and DMADV are both methodologies of Six Sigma—a data-driven approach to improving processes.
DMADV stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and Verify. Whereas DMAIC is used to improve existing processes, DMADV is used to develop a new process.
Meanwhile, PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) is a more general approach to management, focused on continuous improvement.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of the DMAIC approach?
In industry, the adoption of Six Sigma and DMAIC helped drive a lean manufacturing approach with the goal of eliminating waste, defects, and over-production.
Manufacturers found that the more standard deviations there were between their average and acceptable quality limits, the less likely they were to go over those limits. Thus, Six Sigma—or six standard deviations—became the gold standard in defining production limits. How? By helping reduce the number of defects and improving processes.
This statistical approach to identifying and solving root causes of problems was vital to improvement in manufacturing in the 90s and 2000s. Other methodologies, like Kaizen, also played a large role.
Advantages of DMAIC
Whether or not you work in manufacturing, the core benefit of DMAIC is that it’s incredibly rigorous. Problem-solving experiments with new processes can often end up not yielding definitive answers as to what’s changed. By using DMAIC, you’re in a better position to assess and measure progress using data.
DMAIC’s standardized, five-step framework keeps everyone abreast of every stage of the process. By producing documentation to summarize all decisions and progress made, you can move seamlessly from step to step. And by having a definitive process, you can help guide teams in accordance with their current objectives.
Its fans love that DMAIC is iterative and ongoing: The Control phase of the process necessitates that process owners continue to monitor the impacts of optimization. With that data monitoring plan in place, your new process data naturally forms the baseline for a new Measure phase. The DMAIC methodology is able to continually identify problems or impacts on business processes—plus a way to immediately target those issues.
Disadvantages of DMAIC
The structured, thorough aspects of DMAIC are part of its appeal. However, this means following it can be a lengthy, time-consuming, and resource-intensive process. Not ideal if you're a small marketing team juggling multiple projects, or a startup that needs to move fast to get work done.
That’s part of the problem with DMAIC as a whole—it doesn't play well with situations requiring flexibility or dynamism. And it's not supposed to: DMAIC is a rigid process, designed to improve processes incrementally rather than make quick breakthroughs. That can mean innovation is stifled because it doesn't “fit” the incremental approach.
One final disadvantage of DMAIC is its reliance on data. For it to succeed as a process, data collection and analysis are critical. Unintentionally collecting poor-quality data can lead to incorrect conclusions and ineffective solutions. And no business wants to have spent time, money, and considerable effort coming to an ill-informed solution.
When should you use DMAIC?
DMAIC requires team alignment and time to understand. As a manager, it’s worth asking, "Which process or team stands to benefit most from DMAIC?"
Keep in mind that it may not necessarily be the right option for your problem, industry, or organizational culture. Easily identifiable process issues that have prospective simple solutions backed by compelling data mean a full DMAIC process may not be necessary.
When the process problem is more complex or high-risk, such as when you can’t afford a performance decrease, DMAIC can be a smart tactic. Even if it entails a bigger budget than you might want, the process–when properly implemented–should produce results.
How to support the DMAIC process
Attempting a DMAIC project for the first time can be daunting—especially if your organization has major issues. The key to making it work? Collaboration and clear communication. That’s where Dropbox comes in.
How Dropbox can support the DMAIC methodology
Start by creating a Dropbox Paper doc to detail your thoughts and findings as a team, all in one place.
Define your problem, set out how you will measure it, and have each team member drop their findings into the doc to analyze as a group. Together, you can collaborate in this living, breathing document, and come up with ways to incrementally improve the problem process.
You can even finish off the project by detailing a collective control plan and a response plan should the process break down again in the future.
From start to finish, Dropbox Paper enables you to house the whole DMAIC project in one collaborative document. Plus, it can be shared with anyone who needs to see it, ready to access from anywhere, thanks to the cloud.
Best of all, that’s just the start of how Dropbox can help you collaborate with your team, share files effortlessly, and get work done. Explore our plans to find out more.
