From the course: Lean Six Sigma for a Sustainable Future

DMAIC: Define, measure, analyze, improve, and control

From the course: Lean Six Sigma for a Sustainable Future

Start my 1-month free trial

DMAIC: Define, measure, analyze, improve, and control

“

- On your sustainability journey, you'll find the practices of Six Sigma to be incredibly helpful. The customer is the number one focus in Six Sigma. It's a business process improvement approach that seeks to find and eliminate causes of defects and errors. It will help reduce costs, increase productivity and meet customer expectations. Six Sigma contains a lot of tools to leverage data to make decisions. Sustainable environments require having actual data to back up decisions so six Sigma's methods can be used to make improvements. The basics of Six Sigma include a five step method that consists of the following. The define step is where you initiate the project, describe the specific problem, identify the project's goals, and scope and define key customers and they're critical to quality attributes. The measure step is where you understand the data and processes with the view to meeting customer requirements. We develop and evaluate measurement systems and measure current process performance. The next step is analyze. Here, you'll identify the potential cause of problems, analyze current processes, identify relationships between inputs, processes and outputs, and carry out data analysis. Improve is an opportunity to generate solutions based on root causes and data-driven analysis while implementing effective measures. The final step is control. Finalize control systems and verify long-term capabilities for sustainable and long-term success. Six Sigma identifies and eliminates these defects so that the customer in turn is satisfied.

Contents