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Karn G. Bulsuk: Full Speed Ahead

M O N D A Y , F E B R U A R Y Looking2for Kaizen and Toyota Way 9 , 2 0 0

T aking the First Step with the PDCA (Plan-DoCheck-Act) Cycle

Learn the basics of how to use the PDCA Cycle (Plan-Do-CheckAct), the very first quality improvement and effective project management tool in your arsenal when implementing kaizen. By Karn G. Bulsuk

articles? If you're looking for PDCA, 5-why, Horenso or any other articles about Kaizen and the Toyota Way, click here. About Me Karn G. Bulsuk

Karn is a management consultant with extensive experience in both the public and private sectors, in organizations including the World Bank, Toyota and KPMG Advisory. Drawing on his wide-range international experiences, he is a published author and regularly writes about business practices from a global perspective. View my complete profile AddThis

PDCA is the very first, fundamental tool in your arsenal in implementing kaizen. It mainly does three things: 1. Helps you to continually change and tweak what you do in order to: a. Achieve higher quality in your results and processes. b. Gain continual increases in work efficiency. 2. Allows you to clearly see which stage your project is at. 3. Assists you in handling your work logically and systematically. Simply put, PDCA is a way to reduce reliance on Murphys Law and , move from a reactive problem fixing model to a proactive one. The original concept was made popular by statistician Edwards Deming, the father of modern quality management. PDCA is quite easy to understand and quite easy to carry out, as long as you keep track at which stage youre in. To carry PDCA out, you need to follow the four step cycle as in the diagram above. Firstly, you start with Plan.

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P is for Plan
In any project, you will first need a detailed plan. Make sure to identify your goals, delegate work properly and set a clear action plan with key milestones. Dont forget to document your plans in order to help you analyze its effectiveness later.

D is for Do
Once you have your plan, do it! As no plan is ever completely perfect, make sure you make a list of problems as you encounter them, and how you responded to them.

C is for Check

C is for Check
Once youve finished the project, immediately call the team to compile the list of problems and solutions theyve encountered. Share the information with the team so that everyone knows and understands how to avoid these problems, or to fix them if they happen to reappear again later. After that, take an all-encompassing look at the project. There are usually some key areas where youve felt that could improve project efficiency, or where you could have done something better. Brainstorm, and identify areas for improvement. For each problem you found, identify the root causes by using 5-why. In essence, you would set the problem up like an equation, then ask why did this happen? five times. To provide a basic example, lets say that weve just finished organizing a Gala Dinner and we had a , problem in which the catering service delivered the food 2 hours behind schedule. To find the root causes, we would do the following:

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Step

Why? 1 The caterer delivered food 2 hours late. Why did this happen? Why was the Because we did not prepare the 2 purchase order not purchase order on time. prepared on time? Because we did not get all approval Why didnt get the 3 signatures on time. signatures on time? Because we prepared the PO 3 days Why did we prepare 4 before the event. it late? 5 Because we forgot to prepare the PO. Why did we forget about it? Because we didnt have a checklist to Root clearly identify the tasks we needed to Cause: complete at what time. In this case, one of the root causes is that we lacked a checklist to ensure everything was prepared at the designated time. There are a series of four detailed articles on the purpose of 5-why, as well as downloadable tools and tutorials here.

Reason

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A is for Act
Y now know the root causes of the problems, now fix them. Y job ou our here is to ensure these problems dont rear their ugly heads again the next time you carry out this project. Solving an issue by fixing the root cause is like uprooting weeds, as they wont grow back again. If you solve a problem as they come along, then all youre doing is cutting weeds. With a bit of time, theyll just grow back and come back to haunt you. Once the root causes are eliminated, it is important to standardize these techniques in order to ensure that everyone knows about it, and that they dont happen again. That can be achieved through documentation and sharing this knowledge through PDCA meetings with your team, and other stakeholders.

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And when youre done

After youve finished the Act portion, you go right back to Planning the next stage of the project. Dont forget to use what you have learned during the PDCA loop to make the project even better next time.

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Summary
PDCA is a never ending cycle designed to improve quality and efficiency P = Plan your work well.
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D = Do the plan C = Check the problems youve encountered and their root causes. Also identify areas for improvement A = Act to fix the root causes.

Download
I have uploaded the PDCA diagram seen above to share in the Wikimedia Commons as a SVG file, which means you can resize it in a vector editing program such as Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. Alternatively, Wikimedia Commons also has an option to generate the SVG into a PNG file, which means you can use it immediately in your Word documents or PowerPoint presentations immediately without any further editing. There are two versions of the PDCA cycle available for download, one of which includes a detailed subset of PDCA. Please click on the version you would like to download:

Y can read more about horenso (effective communication), PDCA ou (Plan-Do-Check-Act), mieruka (use of visuals) and 5-why here, which also includes articles, tutorials and downloadable diagrams, sheets, PDFs and other tools to help you implement kaizen and bring the competitive edge of the Toyota Way to your manufacturing or serviceindustry project or organization.

Labels: download, kaizen, PDCA, quality control, The Toyota Way

5 comments:
Anonymous said... Thanks Bulsuk this has proved very informative,just want to know for proper referencing,is the PDCA your idea? The reason I am asking is because it is also referred to as the Deming cycle and the shewhart cycle. November 17, 2009 1:34 AM Karn G. Bulsuk said... Hi, thank you for writing. As you rightly pointed out, PDCA is also known as the Deming or the Shewhart cycle. The Deming version was named after Edward Deming, who popularized the cycle in Japan after the Second World War and subsequently spread. It is no means my , idea, but I wanted to communicate it in an easy-to-understand way. Karn November 17, 2009 8:06 PM

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Roger White said... Karn thanks for making your diagram of the PDCA cycle available under a creative commons license via Wikipedia. I have adapted it with proper attribution to you for my own web site at www .helpgov.co.uk. Many thanks. March 30, 2010 6:54 PM Karn G. Bulsuk said... Hi Roger Thank you for that and the attribution - I hope that it's helped you and your business! May 10, 2010 11:11 AM Anonymous said... i would also like to thank you for sharing all the graphics that is available in your blog July 14, 2010 6:33 PM

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Copyright 2009-2011 Karn G. Bulsuk. All Rights Reserved. Content available under Creative Commons licenses are specifically marked. Views and opinions stated in this blog are the authors own, and do not represent the views and opinions of any companies, organizations, clients or any affiliated companies the author may have been associated with.

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