Each of these nine steps is crucial in ensuring that an E-DMAIC system is effective:

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   Define: Describe a vision and a mission. The organization builds a vision and mission that will remain consistent over time, as leaders and strategies come and go. The company's full management team must sign on, and employees must also be on board.

2. Define-Measure: Describe the value chain, including satellite-level and 30,000-foot-level metrics. Most companies manage through their organizational chart, but an IEE company manages based on the fundamental flow of what is being done. Through the process of describing the value chain, a company must attempt to capture, at a high level, what the enterprise's existing processes do and how the company measures what is done. Then it must choose high-level metrics that align to the steps of the value chain. Everything that affects corporate value — and only things that affect corporate value — should be measured. With E-DMAIC, businesses often reduce the number of metrics they monitor.

   The initial creation of metrics must span enough years to ensure that the company can capture data from multiple business cycles (e.g., three to 10) before it sets targets for those metrics. This enables the company to use a control chart to assess whether variations in a 30,000-foot-level performance metric have a common-cause origination — in other words, they result from the random variation that is inherent in the company's processes and inputs — or a special-cause origination — i.e., they result from a circumstance outside the natural variation in processes and inputs.

   All metrics should describe what is important to the business and should address issues of Lean E-DMAIC such as quality, waste, lead time, and total costs. A good metric excels in eight different areas: business alignment, honest assessment, consistency, repeatability and reproducibility, actionability, time-series tracking, predictability, and peer comparability.

   In addition to the corporate 30,000-foot- and satellite-level metrics, an IEE company reports operational metrics throughout its value chain. Each corporate function should have a mission statement that addresses quality, cost, and delivery, along with metrics to gauge performance relative to the mission. A function's generic mission should not change as the overall company's mission changes, but goals for the metrics might change, depending on business inputs and the voice of the customer. Operational metrics assess how organizational functions perform over time and provide prediction statements — that is, functional-process capability/performance measurement statements. Selection of the right metrics enables the analyses in later E-DMAIC steps to provide insight into where directed improvement efforts would have the most benefit to the overall enterprise, so that improvement needs can pull for project creation.

3. Analyze: Analyze the enterprise. Using the metrics it has selected, the company needs to identify action opportunities, considering both problems and improvement possibilities. Managers within the enterprise process management function must analyze performance metrics for the enterprise as a whole, looking for constraints, new product opportunities, and potential for acquisitions or for spinning off parts of the business. In addition to measuring performance on the predetermined metrics, they can use customer value assessment techniques, Theory of Constraints, and value-stream mapping, as appropriate.

   The four “analyze” phases are critically important to the E-DMAIC process. These steps can lead to an innovative solution.

4. Analyze: Establish goals for satellite-level metrics. Next, the company needs to set specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-based (i.e., “SMART”) goals at the satellite level. The highest-level goals need to be realistic and consistent with the improvement opportunities identified in the third E-DMAIC step.

5. Analyze: Create strategies. Every organization requires a certain level of innovation. Some need much; others need little. It's essential to find the optimum level, and E-DMAIC provides a structured method for doing so. Consider how a company with a goal to improve profit margins might select a strategy of reducing the number of defective units it produces. This strategy could lead to an innovative procedure for determining how to reduce production-generated defective products. One example of this is an aluminum extrusion process in which the total revenue for one part is approximately equal to the die-breakage cost for the extrusion operation. A design of experiments (DOE) technique might lead to an innovative solution that improves the current extrusion manufacturing process by eliminating die breakage for this part and for all production parts throughout the plant. Or, for another illustration, consider a scented candle manufacturing plant whose business is seasonal. A traditional Lean Six Sigma project might be designed to reduce waste in the manufacturing of the candles. However, an IEE project that stepped back to view the big picture could refocus managers' attention on the question: How can we use this idle facility during the scented candles' off season, since we're already paying rent on the building for the full year?

   Innovation does not always provide a payoff. A new product that's developed may not fit into the company's existing product line, or the company may not have a system in place to appropriately take it to market. The facts that E-DMAIC focuses first on big picture metrics and that this no-nonsense approach removes much of the subjective, personality-driven element from strategy-setting help ensure that strategies for innovation are aligned with the company's overall needs and are both relevant and productive.

6. Analyze: Identify high-potential improvement areas, and establish related SMART 30,000-foot-level metric goals. Goals set for the 30,000-foot-level metrics are the ultimate determinants of what changes in an organization. Therefore, it is crucial that these goals align with business needs throughout the value chain. In addition, the enterprise process management team must secure ownership of every goal selected; the project champion should be the owner of the metric that is targeted for improvement. The enterprise process management team must also establish a time frame for the goal's implementation.

7. Improve: Identify and execute projects. Once improvement goals are set, the company should select and assign well-scoped projects that are neither too large nor too small. All projects must reflect the integration of analytics and innovation. This isn't difficult once a company has established IEE, because the system's no-nonsense approach to metric tracking and identification of improvement opportunities establishes a culture focused on better use of analytics. Tracking metrics with this system highlights the fact that to make improvements, companies need to do something fundamentally different. The only logical solution is to use analytics and innovation more effectively. Note that this is very different from saying simply that a company needs to create “an innovation environment,” which often leads people to go off in directions that do not benefit the enterprise as a whole.

8. Improve: Assess the project's final impact on enterprise goals. Assess how well objectives were met relative to the achievement of enterprise goals. Establish a system for collecting and analyzing lessons learned.

9. Control: Maintain the gain. IEE businesses track high-level value-chain metrics, then review those results as part of management meetings to ensure that the performance of a particular metric that improved as a result of a given project does not subsequently degrade to its previous level. Most non-IEE organizations have control systems that involve audits, regulatory compliance assessments, personnel performance appraisals, codes of conduct, Sarbanes-Oxley assessments, and so forth. However, they often view these activities as independent and unrelated, and they fail to question them relative to improvement opportunities. Companies can connect these seemingly independent control systems at the enterprise level. Among other advantages, doing so makes it easier for the company to assess whether all its E-DMAIC control-phase measurements are conducted efficiently and effectively. Ownership of this big-picture composition and feedback system should reside with the enterprise process management function.