Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) as Part of Lean Six Sigma Project Execution Roadmap in Improve Phase

The four-step process of PDCA is also known as the Deming cycle, Shewhart cycle, or plan-do-study-act (PDSA). Dr. Edwards Deming popularized PDCA, which he later modified to Plan Do Study Act (PDSA), since “study” better described his intended action than “check.”

An Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) system goes Beyond Lean Six Sigma and the Balanced Scorecard. In an IEE project execution, passive data analyses and/or a Design of Experiments (DOE) can directly lead to a long-lasting solution. However, there are situations when a solution is not obvious and knowledge needs to be gained through an over-time iterative fine-tuning process. For this type situation, a solution can be developed through reiteratively executing the PDCA cycle. When used in the improvement phase of a Lean Six Sigma Project Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (P-DMAIC), assessment of change in the 30,000-foot-level project response can be considered part of the PDCA check step.

The PDCA process can also be used for solution development to an Enterprise process Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control (E-DMAIC) improve-phase Business Process Improvement Event (BPIE). This application situation might not have a direct link to a key performance 30,000-foot-level metric. However, general consensus could be that real-time process improvement is needed for a particular business area, which can indirectly affect another key business metric. For this situation, an individual or a team could undertake the PDCA structure for making improvement. The PDCA could also be used in Design for Integrated Enterprise Excellence (DIEE) for process development.

The PDCA execution model steps, which can utilized in the improve phases of P-DMAIC or E-DMAIC and DIEE process development, is:

Plan: Plan a change and its test to determine if a process modification is beneficial.

Do: Implement the change and its test on a small scale.

Check or study: Assess the test results to determine what was learned. Describe what went right, what went wrong, and how well the change worked. A 30,000-foot-level control chart and a hypothesis test can provide a quantitative assessment of how the change impacted the process output.

Act: Determine whether to adopt the change, abandon the change, or repeat the PDCA cycle. A termination decision is appropriate when no significant value is anticipated through the execution of additional PDCA cycles. It can be appropriate to either abort or repeat the PDCA cycle when the evaluated change would create adherence issues or no/minimal improvements were observed. A repeat of the PDCA cycle would be appropriate when the amount of improvement was not as much as desired but additional change enhancements opportunities have been identified. When objectives are met, the process needs to be standardized. In IEE, agreed-to process enhancements are to be documented in the organization’s E-DMAIC value chain.

The power of PDCA is in its apparent simplicity and inductive logic utilization. While being relative easy to understand, it can be difficult to accomplish on a on-going basis due to the analytical difficulty in judging tested hypotheses on the basis of measured results.

It has been described how process improvement activities (whether they are Lean Six Sigma, Total Quality Management (TQM), Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), etc.) frequently do not affect the big picture; hence, management rightfully so is hesitant to undertake effort expenditure. A plan-do-check-act (PDCA) methodology is very good; however, it can have similar problems; e.g., improvements are in silos and do not impact the big picture.

I like to describe organizational enterprise process improvement using a refinishing-furniture analogy, where the furniture’s appearance relates to how well the organization is performing in total revenue and profitability. What typically happens in all the above process improvement efforts are a polish-the-handle then sand-a-leg, and then sand-a-side of the furniture approach? With this approach, we can expend a lot of effort and the furniture still does not look good.

This problem is overcome with the deployment of an Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) system that starts with the enterprise process Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (E-DMAIC) system. In this E-DMAIC system, organizational 30,000-foot-level performance metric improvement needs pull for the creation of process improvement projects.

The above is a modified excerpt from the book-volume, Integrated Enterprise Excellence, Volume III Improvement Project Execution: A Management and Black Belt Guide for Going Beyond Lean Six Sigma and the Balanced Scorecard, copyright 2008.

This book and others in the IEE 4 book-volume series are available at book resellers such as Amazon.com.

Forrest Breyfogle
Forrest@SmarterSolutions.com
www.SmarterSolutions.com