DMAIC Methodology

In this competitive world, each organization needs to fight for a place at the top. To sustain competitiveness, each organization needs to produce and deliver defect free products. In order to do so, organizations follow many different business management strategies. One of the most popular strategy is Six Sigma.

Six Sigma is a business management strategy that involves betterment of the organization's existing products to render them free of defects. It is the method used to measure defects in a million units of the product. Six Sigma has been used since ancient times.

Claiming to save millions of dollars by avoiding defects in the products, Motorola had made this concept very popular, prompting many organizations to adopt Six Sigma too. The DMAIC methodology is one of the methodologies followed by Six Sigma.

• The team is formed with a specific purpose in mind. This is what the define stage is all about.
• The team needs to sit together and define the scope, goal, budget, duration, and the problem.

• The leader of the team makes a charter document where they mention all these aspects in complete detail. Then, work begins.
• The team defines the problem and then sets about finding the root cause and finding ways to eliminate that cause.

• Here, the performance of the process is measured.
• The feedback of people who manufacture products, feedback from customers who use the products, and the way the product is processed, are all measured.

• The team also takes a look at business growth strategies. This can be known as the data collection step too.
• All relevant data that is important to the product and the processes followed to manufacture the product is collected at this stage.

• The next step in the DMAIC process, analyze, as the name suggests, is an analysis of the data collected in the previous phase.
• It is important to analyze the feedback given by customers, as they are the end users of the product, and the product needs to match their needs.

• In this stage, the root cause of the problem is identified.
• A process chart, here, helps the team in understanding where the process of manufacturing the product has gone wrong.

• The process chart helps the team in redesigning the process, after elimination of problems.
• A complete new process chart is then made, which highlights the changes and improvements to be incorporated, in order to do away with defects.

• The concepts of total quality management and lean manufacturing are used in this stage.
• Documentation accompanies the new process chart, which provides the changes made in the process, in detail.
• Work at this stage becomes easy, if the team has collected enough data.

• This is the last stage in the DMAIC model.
• After the new process is designed, the organization replaces the old process with the new one.
• The team closely monitors the working of the new process and ensures that there are no problems in the new process.
• They monitor the performance of the new process and ensure that products manufactured are defect-free.

• If there are any further changes to be made, the team makes changes and again measures the performance of the process.
• Under proper guidance and observance of the team, new process is adopted by the organization.

The DMAIC methodology is one of the most techniques ones used by organizations worldwide. It has helped organizations save lots of money as well as increase their customer base. It is a very good and practical method to produce defect-free goods.