ABSTRACT
Edwards Deming, the father of modern quality control, said that anything that is measured gets better. The main purpose of the Measure phase is to establish a clear as-is picture of where the existing process is today and to make sure that the tools used to measure the activity are reliable and valid. The reliability of the tool being used to measure must be considered in this phase. In manufacturing environments, this may mean the calibration of certain tools. A prioritization or decision matrix is a useful technique that can be used with team members or users to achieve consensus about an issue. In service industries, in which simple observation is often used to determine how well things are going, it may mean documenting who and how the observations are being made. Internal benchmarking compares activities and processes within the organization to another operation in the same company.
