DMAIC vs DMEDI in Six Sigma

DMAIC

 - DMAIC refers to Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control.

 - It is an analytical, data-driven approach used to reduce waste and improve the existing process, products and service to meet customer requirements.

 - It focus on incremental improvements such as reducing variation and defects.

 - DMAIC steps find common use to improve existing processes to suit customer needs.

DMEDI

 - DMEDI refers to Define, Measure, Explore, Develop, Implement.

 - Steven H. Jones said that DMEDI is more of a creative approach to designing new robust processes, products and services. 

 - DMEDI aims at securing a equal leap over existing processes, products, or services, and seeks a competitive advantage.

 - DMEDI processes help in setup new processes or changing processes after defining customer needs relative to a product or service.

DMAIC vs DMEDI

Phase 1 Define

 - There is no difference in the “Define" phase of both DMAIC and DMEDI, with both approaches making clear the business problems, desired results, and limitations in clear terms.

Phase 2 Measure

 - The Measure phase of DMAIC determines customer groups and customer requirements and obtain the data to measure performance.

 - DMAIC works on existing definition of Critical Customer Requirements (CCR).

 - The Measure phase of DMEDI places critical importance to identify customers and their needs. This phase concentrates on obtaining as much client and stakeholder input as possible. Input of this phase contains Existing process, baseline outputs, Critical Customer Requirements (CCR), Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

Phase 3 Analyze / Explore

 - Analyze phase in DMAIC breaks down existing data to analyze root cause of a defect. While analyzing users look into how the process, project or product turned out. They can see, feel and touch it.

 - Explore phase in DMEDI's approach is to provide conceptual design of a new process that satisfies customer need and specifications. We can imagine only that how the end product will look like as it is a conceptual design.

Phase 4 Improve / Develop

 - Improve phase in DMAIC delivers the improved process by removing the defects and wastes from existing processes based on statistical or mathematical proof.

 - After exploring the various design options for the new process, product or services the Develop phase in DMEDI delivers the most optimal design based on customer preferences. 

Phase 5 Control / Implement

 - The DMAIC approach entails establishing control systems to prevent the improved process from relapsing to the previous defects or drawbacks, and seeks to check waste, cost, or time in a process.

 - In DMAIC a temporary small-scale future-state pilot lot is conducted in improvement phase before implementation the solution.

 - The DMEDI implement phase, pilot lot is conducted to validate the capability of the proposed process to meet or exceed project objective and identify problem to prevent potential losses.

The major difference between these two method is that, DMAIC focused on reducing waste, cost and process time while DMEDI focused on preventing potential losses.