PDCA Cycle - What Is It And How To Use It

In case you are looking for the different lean methods that you can use within your business, you should consider the PDCA cycle. ​

But what exactly is the PDCA cycle?

imply put, the PDCA cycle refers to Play - Do - Check - Act cycle and it is a model that you can use when you need to make a change within your business. When you are looking for constant improvements in management, manufacturing, among others, then you should consider using the PDCA cycle.

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We can definitely say that the PDCA cycle is an interactive approach when you want to continually improve services, people, and products, and is an integral part of the Lean management.

Within the PDCA cycle, you will need to test, analyze results, and finally improve the process.

Let's say that your customers are always complaining about your support team is slow. Now that you know that you have a problem, you will need to improve your team so they can be faster in customer support.

The PDCA Cycle In Detail

As we already mentioned above, the PDCA cycle refers to Play - Do - Check - Act. This means that the PDCA cycle includes 4 different stages. Let's take a closer look at each one of these stages:

#1: Plan:

When you suddenly discover there is a problem within any area of your business, the first thing that you need to do is to plan what you need to do.

Depending on the problem, you may need the help and support of your team to ensure that you detail each step of the plan to prevent any failures.

During this stage, you need to make sure that you are able to answer to the following questions:

-  What exactly is the problem that you need to solve?
- What resources will you need?
- What resources do you already have?
- Taking into consideration the resources that you have available, what is the best solution for the problem that you have in hands?
- What are the goals that can be considered the plan to be a success?

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#2: Do:

Now that you already defined the entire plan that allows you to solve the problem, it is time to take action. During this stage, you will be using all the information gathered during the previous stage.

One of the things that you need to keep in mind is that there is a chance for unexpected problems to occur. In addition, you need to make sure that everyone in your team knows exactly what they needed to do as well as their responsibilities.

#3: Check:

Considered by many as the most important stage of the PDCA cycle, the Check stage is when you clarify the plan and ensure that you avoid all recurring mistakes. In addition, this is also the stage where you apply continuous improvement successfully.

This is the stage where you look at your plan and how things went and you evaluate if the plan actually worked or not as well as if it was well executed. In addition, you should also ask your team to identify any part or parts of the plan that was more problematic so that you can eliminate them next time.

In case there was any kind of problem executing the plan, you need to make sure that you find the root cause.

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#4: Act:

This is the last stage of the PDCA cycle and this is where you can finally act.

In case everything worked out fine and your team was able to get to the defined goals, then you can process and apply your initial plan.