PDCA cycle

The PDCA cycle is a way of improving continuously using a fixed structure. The four letters of the PDCA cycle stand for the four phases you go through: Plan, Do, Check, Act. The PDCA cycle can be applied in any sector.

Deming circle

The PDCA cycle has its origins in Deming’s quality circle. This is a creative tool for quality management and problem-solving developed by William Edwards Deming. Deming based his circle on the improvement cycle of the physicist Walter A. Shewhart. It is an important part of Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma, but also of Agile transformations.

Meaning of PDCA

The circle describes four activities that apply to every improvement in an organisation: Plan, Do, Check and Act. Because the cycle is iterative, quality improvement stays on the agenda all the time. The order of the circle can be traced back to the scientific process described by Francis Bacon (Novum Organum, 1620): hypothesis, experiment, evaluation.

The four phases of the PDCA cycle

Suppose you work in an administrative department and the process from ‘supplier invoice received’ to ‘supplier invoice paid’ is not running well. Errors are being made and the lead time of the process is simply too long.

If we want to solve this problem with the PDCA cycle, we go about it as follows:

• Plan: We come up with a plan to solve the problem. This phase consists of a number of activities. We sharpen the problem we are going to tackle by mapping the current situation, identifying the causes and working out which countermeasures we are going to carry out. At the end of this phase we know how we are going to tackle the problem.
• Do: We carry out our plan. Do this in a controlled test set-up. Simple enough, right? At the end of this phase we have implemented the solutions we came up with.
• Check: We check whether our solution has delivered the desired result. Have we reached our goal? How do our process and our organisation respond to the countermeasures we implemented? At the end of this phase we have evaluated the new way of working.
• Act: Finally, it is important that you respond to the results from the previous phase. At the end of this phase you may need to make a few changes to the new way of working to secure the process. Use the measured results to adjust where they do not match the objectives.

You may even have to conclude that the new way of working unfortunately does not run as well as expected after all. And that is completely… fine! That is exactly what the PDCA cycle is so good for: creating a culture of continuous improvement. Because whether or not your initial problem has been solved, once you have completed a PDCA cycle the next step is always the same: start a new PDCA cycle.

Adding value iteratively

The PDCA cycle scales flexibly. You can apply it to a project of a few months, but you can also run through a PDCA cycle in a single day. It depends on the size and complexity of the problem you want to solve.

What matters most is that you have achieved something by the end of the cycle and have secured the new level of quality. Thanks to this iterative structure you keep building on the quality of your organisation, step by step.

Continuous improvement thanks to PDCA

Back to the finance department’s process for a moment. If the problem has not been solved, it is wise to start a new PDCA cycle. In other words: ‘Back to the drawing board!’ So: take another close look at the problem and draw up a plan of approach (Plan), implement different countermeasures (Do), check again whether this situation produces the desired results (Check) and take new actions if needed (Act).

If the problem was solved in the first PDCA cycle, you can start a new PDCA cycle for an entirely different problem. There is, after all, always something to improve.

In fact, you can see our 9-step plan reflected in the PDCA cycle. It is the backbone of our Green Belt training, in which you learn to improve processes.

Growth thanks to the PDCA cycle

The video below explains what the four phases of the PDCA cycle are. Discover how PDCA helps organisations analyse processes, implement improvements, measure results and make adjustments for continuous growth and optimisation.