What is the difference between pdca and dmaic?

What is the difference between pdca and dmaic?
They are quite similar, actually. DMAIC is the more recent development and can be considered to have evolved from PDCA. It is hard to force an exact comparison but, basically 'DMAI' can all be considered equivalent to 'Plan'; 'I' can also be considered similar to 'Do'; and 'C' can be considered equivalent to 'Check' and 'Act'.


The fundamental difference between the two is that PDCA is more of a cycle than DMAIC. PDCA is more effective at chipping away at continuous improvement initiatives (so you keep going around the cycle in order to ultimately achieve perfection in your process); whereas DMAIC is quite statistic-heavy and more useful for resolving variability, in particular variability with 'special cause' (so you use it to identify the root cause of a deviation, implement corrective actions and 'control' your corrective actions) therefore it is more of a path with a start and an end than a cycle.