How to use the Plan, Do, Check, Act framework

Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) is a four-stage cycle that you can use to continuously improve your business. It is an integral part of Lean Management.

PDCA aims to improve business processes; this is done by planning and introducing solutions, testing them, and analysing the results.

As an example, imagine that you receive several complaints about slow delivery rates. To keep your customer satisfied, you will need to improve your delivery rate. This is where PDCA comes into play.

Plan

The first step is to create a plan. Establish your objective(s) and decide which processes are critical to delivering the desired results. Make sure you involve the whole team. The plan should consist of small steps that will feed into a more comprehensive plan. This is often best visualised as a process map.

When constructing a plan, state your goals and be realistic:

1. What is the critical problem you need to solve, e.g. what does the customer want to pay for?
2. What resources do you need/have?
3. What is the best solution for fixing the problem with the available resources to meet the customer’s specification profitably?

Think about what a successfully executed plan will look like and how you will measure success.

Using the example above, a successful outcome could be fewer complaints about delivery times.

When setting your objectives, it is important to consider what the customer expects. For example, if your delivery period is seven days and the customer expects to receive their goods in four days, there is no value in reducing your delivery period to a next day service at a significantly greater cost.

In agriculture, this could apply to contract specifications. You might be paid on weight, backfat, protein levels (wheat or dairy), or butterfat, with specific set parameters, for example. So, there is no value in over processing your product if you aren’t going to receive a financial reward for doing so, i.e. do not boost milk butterfat if nobody pays you for it, or conversely you can achieve greater value by doing something else.

The planning stage provides an opportunity to identify waste. This can be done by carrying out a waste walk. If you find numerous issues that need fixing, you can prioritise them using a Pareto Analysis, which establishes which actions will give you the most value in return.

Once you and your team have discussed ways to improve the process and are familiar with the plan, you can move to the next step – Do.

Do

After the plan has been agreed, it is time to act. During this stage, you will implement the actions discussed during the planning phase.

Be mindful that unforeseen problems may arise during this stage. Consider implementing your plan on a small scale at first, in a controlled environment, before scaling up. To help your team apply the plan smoothly, ensure that everybody knows their roles and responsibilities.

As an example, to improve delivery times, an initiative could be to try new delivery routes. An unforeseen issue could be regular heavy traffic. It would be sensible to trial this idea with dummy deliveries before rolling it out with real customer orders and widescale adoption.

Any activity that leads to a change in process needs to be embedded and accessible to everyone across the business. This often requires a standard operating procedure (SOP) to be created so the same process can be followed to the same standard by all staff. Alternatively, solutions could result in processes becoming automated, removing human error as a source of waste, or making it impossible for errors to be made, which in Japanese is referred to as poka-yoke.

Poka-yoke is a Japanese term that means ‘mistake-proofing’ or ‘inadvertent error prevention’. A poka-yoke is any mechanism in a process that helps an equipment operator avoid mistake defects by preventing, correcting, or drawing attention to human errors as they occur.

Poka-yoke can be simple solutions, such as visual boards that make it clear when tools have not been returned, to fixed-volume dosing guns that ensure the same dose is always delivered. This is often used in conjunction with different fittings to make sure the wrong gun is not used with the wrong medicine. Safety features that will not allow engines to start until all safety solutions have been engaged is another example.

Check 

This is the most vital stage of Plan, Do, Check, Act. During the check phase, the data and results gathered from the 'do' phase are evaluated. To check your progress against a starting point, there must be some data collection that provides an indicator of progress. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) help you understand how your business is performing and whether processes are effective. We recommend that businesses should set KPIs under four pillars: performance, productivity, survivability, and yield. 

Here, you need to assess whether your initial plan worked and if it led to improvements. You may have even identified new inefficiencies that can be eliminated in the future. If anything went wrong during the process, find the root cause and make sure you understand why this happened.

Using the example above regarding delivery times, you might measure the time taken for successful delivery or how many complaints were received. Newly identified inefficiencies could include the need to refuel on the journey, increasing the overall delivery time. Having fleets with larger fuel tanks may prevent this and could be implemented into the plan.

The 'check' phase allows you to clarify your plan, avoid reccurring mistakes and identify new opportunities for continuous improvement. It is important to challenge your data regularly to understand the extent of waste in your production system and to prioritise labour. Calculations such as Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) enable you to identify the extent of waste from your productive unit (e.g. cow, sow, ewe, soil) and target your labour effectively. This process is known as root cause analysis.

Act 

You have developed, applied, and checked your plan. Now, you need to act.

Prioritising what needs to be fixed first and tracking progress can be challenging. However, using Kanban boards can allow performance and projects to be monitored by the whole team.

Kanban boards visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process.

These can be simple whiteboards right through to more complex reports and visualisations produced by management software such as herd management systems or cropping systems such as Gatekeeper.

If everything is running smoothly and your team has managed to achieve the original goals, then you can proceed and implement your new strategy, ensuring that the SOPs produced at the end of the doing phase are understood and accessible to all staff involved. Staff may require further training and support to ensure they can access your new processes, for example, via stockperson development or management training. 

This new strategy will become the new standard baseline. 

Continuous improvement 

You can then repeat the Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle to improve the process further, making sure to use the Pareto Analysis decision-making technique to help assess and prioritise tasks. This will help you tackle the most impactful, rather than the quickest and easiest tasks, first.

The Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle is a simple but powerful strategy for improving efficiencies at any level of your business by removing waste. The repetitive approach helps your team find and test solutions and enhance the process. However, remember it requires a certain amount of time and may not be appropriate for solving urgent issues. 

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