Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) in Quality Management System
Plan, Do, Check, Act or PDCA as it is more commonly known has been around since the 1930s when Walter Shewhart established the idea. It did not come to prominence however, until the 1950s when W Edwards Deming used these principles to help countries after the Second World War to re-establish their manufacturing bases. Its main driver is for improvement no matter what the situation or organization. What does this mean in practice to the management systems standards and specifically ISO 9001?
The High Level Structure that the standard is built upon is based on PDCA. The user will see that the majority of the standard is taken up by planning the QMS that will provide the customer with what has been agreed. In theory, if the planning is done successfully then the ‘do’ should happen smoothly, which is ‘checked’ and any lessons learnt are ‘acted’ upon to provide improvement. Lets take a simple example: The concept works like this:
Plan: Every piece of planning starts with an idea, a policy, an objective, a target, a goal. All of these are created as a result of the realization that something needs to be done, and before it is done it has to be ‘planned’. Take booking a holiday for example. You want to go on holiday to somewhere you like the look of in a brochure. You need to ask yourself a number of questions that have to be answered before you book the holiday.
• Where do you want to go?
• When do you want to go?
• How will you get there?
• How much will it cost?
As you go through answering all these questions you are gradually planning your holiday.
Do: When the holiday is planned and booked you then go on the holiday. This is ‘doing’ what you have planned.
Check : Most people, when they arrive at their chosen holiday destination – probably subconsciously – check to see if what it said in the brochure is actually what they have received. Is the beach really just 5 minutes from the hotel; can they see the beach from their room?
Act: So what do you do with the information you have found out from your experience of the holiday. Well, you liked the resort but not the hotel so you would like to return next year but to a different hotel.
Plan: (next year) You start to plan for next year based upon what you learnt this year so you IMPROVE on what happened last year. Do (next year) From the figure above you will see that after the ‘Act’ does not return to the original ‘Plan’ but should go forward to what will become Plan (for next year) and so on. If after the act you returned to the original ‘Plan’ this would be returning to where you started from and nothing would have been learnt and there would be no improvement. In conclusion, the PDCA cycle should be looked at as a never-ending spiral of improvement.
The simple example we looked at (holidays booking) showing how the process works in practise. Within your QMS, the approach is the same- plan the processes you need to implement, create a necessary procedure and documentations act upon them- update, adapt and improve as needed to reflect your day to day activities. For more information and support reach out to APRICITY nova team.