The PDCA cycle is an age-old topic, and almost everyone knows what it's about. But do you really follow it step by step in your daily life and work? When you find yourself facing a lot of difficulties, do you ever think about it because you didn't follow the steps?
What is PDCA?
PDCA cycle can find and improve a variety of management problems, and can be applied to all fields, from enterprise strategy management, environmental pollution management to departmental project management, education and training, self-management, etc., by people constantly, formally or informally, consciously or indirectly applied to the subconscious to do everything.
The Characteristics of PDCA
Reinforcement - The PDCA cycle is not a cycle that stays at one level, but a process of solving problems and gradually increasing intelligence and experience. At the end of each PDCA cycle, the level of work of production managers increases as part of the problem is resolved. In this way, through one PDCA cycle after another, production managers continue to find problems, solve problems, management capacity and efficiency will continue to improve.
Tools for Statistics - The PDCA cycle applies scientific statistical concepts and approaches, and is an effective tool for identifying and solving problems. Data is everywhere in the implementation of the PDCA loop. For example, the plan has data, and the inspection process produces data. With this data, production managers can do some statistical work, such as efficiency, equipment turnover, utilization rate and so on.
Iterative and Incremental Improvement - Week after week - the four stages of the PDCA loop are terminated without running once, they run round and round. At the end of a loop, while some of the problems are resolved, there may be others that are not resolved, or new problems that arise, and then move on to the next PDCA loop.
Hierarchical structure - for example, a team can do a small PDCA cycle, a department can do a medium PDCA cycle, and the entire enterprise can do a large PDCA cycle. The relationship between an organization's overall PDCA and its internal and embedded sub-PDCA cycles can form a hierarchy.
PDCA cycle can find and improve a variety of management problems, can be applied to various fields, large to the enterprise's strategic management, environmental pollution management, as small as the department's project management, education and training , or even self-management.
