Process Improvement with DMAIC
Krisanna N Hall
Southern New Hampshire University
OL-324: Managing Quality
Instructor Troy Burrows
April 10, 2021
Process Improvement with DMAIC
Define the project goals and customer (internal and external) deliverables
To be successful in this process improvement project, the quality department (my team
and myself) must set forth a policy that details the methods of identifying separate processes, and
the allowability of one to achieve and maintain process certifications. This policy will need to
have rules that allow us to determine an employee's capabilities to process work on their own,
with no second inspection. It will also need a method of obtaining proof of proficiency, and what
to do if there is a lack of proficiency demonstrated. Furthermore, we will need an employee
involvement tool that will place the accountability in the employee's hands to know what they
are certified to. This could potentially involve a benchmark of similar industries to see how they
process certifications, or if they even allow employees to participate in such an opportunity,
benchmarking is a process used for obtaining measurable objectives, a benchmark. (Stroud,
2014).
Measure the process to determine current performance
As mentioned above, the policy that the quality department intends to set forth will also
have measurable data to allow us to verify proficiency is demonstrated. Currently, there is a lack
of measurable data for the defects we are seeing because they are either not being recorded in our
system of record, or they are not being caught by the employee who once demonstrated superior
quality high enough to obtain the process certification, meaning their work does not go to second
inspection. We can only measure the small amount of data that is either found in test, or during
root cause analysis for another issue, which is typically where we find that operators are
accepting the work of a process in which they are not certified to. A tool that would be helpful to
Process Improvement with DMAIC
capture this data more frequently would be a check sheet to account for how frequently the
defect is occurring in a structured and uniform manner (ASQ, n.d.).
Analyze and determine the root causes of the defects.
The root cause of the defects leads back to lack of training, lack of attention, lack of process
criteria, lack of accountability, and lack of involvement on both the quality department, and the
production teams. A tool that would be helpful would be a fishbone diagram, it would allow my
team to quickly identify the problem statement, and root causes of our issue, and sort them into
categories that are useful and easy to read for both quality, and production (ASQ, n.d.).
Due to the employees lacking the training required to identify separate processes, they are
building product in the same method that they do any other process.
Due to our lack of attention in the quality department, we were unable to determine that
this was an ongoing issue until the defects escaped o