A favorite axiom in management is, “If you aren’t measuring it, you aren’t managing it”. Just as driving a car with your eyes closed will result in disaster, running a business without some sort of performance feedback will result in business disaster.

The collection and use of data is important because things are rarely what they seem to be. Data helps us separate what is really happening from what we think is happening (or what we want to be happening). When we make decisions based on how things feel or how they have always been, we are operating in the “as we think it is” world. This is a prescription for disaster. The successful business operates in the real world. We call this the “as-is” world.

The measure phase of a Six Sigma process improvement project focuses on characterizing the current performance of a business process, which is the current reality. In this phase, the Six Sigma project team is trying to accomplish two things. First is to establish an “as-is” performance measurement for the process. Second, is to use the data to begin looking for potential causes of defects.

Some of the important activities of the Measure phase are:

• Developing a data collection plan and following it
• Performing a measurement system analysis
• Calculating performance indicators for the process from the data collected
• Control charting

The objective is to measure the process’ impact on the customer’s CTQ (Critical to Quality) issues. The result is the characterization of the process’ performance from the customer’s perspective. This becomes the process’ story in the “as-is” world.