Improvement Insights Blog

Most companies are drowning in data, so you don’t need to Define and Measure anything new. Take DM out of DMAIC to accelerate results. Here’s why:

“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].

“In the whole Six Sigma world, the DMAIC process, one of the things I’ve noticed is every company I’ve ever gone to… ever… has so much data they’re just… they’re drowning in their own data, and they don’t know how to analyze what they’ve got. And yet in DMAIC, we teach people to Define and then figure out something to Measure. They can spend a lot of time doing nothing but recreating some metric that won’t work.

“I’m telling you right now, there’s more than enough data in your company right now to start making dramatic improvements immediately. I think we ought to take the DM out of DMAIC. I think it just should be “Analyze Improve Control,” “Analyze Improve Control,” “Analyze Improve Control,” until such a point as you run out of data to make improvements with. Then you might have to come back and say, “Well, maybe we need a different kind of metric,” but I’m pretty much guaranteeing you everything you need to know is already out there in one of your systems. You know, it could be a sales system, it could be a customer record system, it could be purchasing, payments… These things are going to be out there, right? Your call center data, all of that stuff, you can take that data and turn it into improvement projects that’ll make dramatic improvements, and you don’t have to Define and Measure a thing. Just start Analyzing and Improving and Controlling.

“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s create a hassle-free America. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”