Interactive Guide · Scoping
Where does the process start?
A SIPOCis a one-page map of a process across those five columns. A team builds one at the very start of an improvement project — it’s the Define step of Six Sigma’s DMAIC — to agree on what they’re actually fixing before anyone spends a dollar analyzing it.
Which makes it sound like paperwork. It isn’t. A SIPOC is the contract that decides whether your project is finishable, and everything hinges on two marks: where the process starts, and where it ends. Move them and watch what happens.
Five columns, read in a minute
A finished SIPOC for hospital discharge. Tap any column — each one has a test that tells you whether you’ve filled it in honestly.
The boundary is the project
Hospital inpatient discharge — a real, messy process. Twelve candidate steps. Your team has been asked to fix discharge delays. Where do you draw the line?
Process spine
drag ↕The SIPOC this produces
Physician writes discharge… → …physically leaves unitEvery box hides a mess
Those five steps aren’t the process — they’re a choiceabout what to show. Click “Prepare discharge meds” to see what’s actually underneath one of them.
Five steps. Verb, then noun. No decisions, no loops, no branches — a stranger reads it in under a minute. Every one of these boxes has a whole world inside it.
When someone asks mid-project to “just also look at the follow-up appointments,” the SIPOC is what you point at. It’s not documentation — it’s the thing you defend.
Now scope yours — free SIPOC builder →Frequently asked
- How wide should a SIPOC be?
- Wide enough to contain the problem you were asked to fix, narrow enough that one team can hold it. A practical ceiling is around 7 process steps and 4 departments — past that, every extra department adds a set of priorities to align and a calendar to fight, and the project becomes a program. If your scope needs more than that, it is a signal to split it into two projects, not to widen the SIPOC.
- What is the difference between a SIPOC and a process map?
- Altitude. A SIPOC is 5–7 steps with no decisions, no loops, and no branches — plus the surrounding context of who supplies the inputs and who receives the outputs. A process map zooms into the work and shows every decision, wait, and rework loop. You build the SIPOC first to agree what you are fixing, and map the flow later to find out why it is slow. Adding detail to a SIPOC does not improve it; it destroys the thing that made it useful.
- When do you revisit the SIPOC?
- At every tollgate, and any time someone proposes adding scope. That is its real job: it is the artifact you point at when a stakeholder asks you to also look at something. A SIPOC filed after the kickoff has done nothing. A SIPOC on the wall that someone loses an argument to has paid for itself.
- Do the customers in a SIPOC have to be external?
- No — most are internal, and the internal ones are usually where the delay hides. In hospital discharge, the patient is the obvious customer, but bed management and the next patient waiting in the ED are customers too, and they are the ones feeling the four-hour wait. Name a role or a person, never an institution: "the hospital" is not a customer.
- Where does SIPOC fit in DMAIC?
- SIPOC belongs to Define, the D in DMAIC, and is usually built alongside the project charter. Its outputs and customers become the starting point for Voice-of-the-Customer and critical-to-quality work. Once scope is agreed, the detailed analysis follows — map the flow with a value stream map, baseline quality with sigma level and DPMO, and find causes with a fishbone in the Analyze phase.
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Updated July 2026 · The hospital discharge process, its steps, and all figures are illustrative, created for teaching. SIPOC is the standard Define-phase scoping tool in Six Sigma’s DMAIC.