Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (DMAIC)

The five steps of DMAIC are define, measure, analyze, improve and control. The first three steps have to do with identifying problems and benchmarking, while analyzing how improvements might work. The fourth step, improvement, is the actual change process. The last step, control, has to do with maintaining the changes or improvements that are made and controlling the outcomes accordingly.

As an example of using DMAIC, this process might apply to health-care administration, where administrators look at doing various things like preventing medical mistakes, lowering infection and re-admission rates, or improving the quality of patient care. Administrators may use metrics like service costs, customer satisfaction and clinical achievement to drive process changes that create measurable value within the business context. These same principles work in other industries, but are often applied to health care and other fields that are otherwise hard to implement improvements in.