PDCA and Kaizen
Plan, do, check, act: small cycles of change, run often, by the people who do the work. Kaizen means continuous improvement.
About 5 minutes to read.
Key idea
Not every improvement needs a project. Most need a team that is allowed to try things. Plan, do, check, act is the rhythm: plan a small change and predict what it will do, do it on a small scale, check what actually happened against the prediction, then act, by adopting the change, adjusting it or dropping it.
The power is in the repetition. A team that runs a small cycle every week makes fifty improvements a year, each one tested. Kaizen, a Japanese word for change for the better, describes this culture of steady improvement, and also the focused workshop, the Kaizen event, where a small team spends a few days fixing one process together.
Example: a warehouse event
Four days on the returns bench
A clothing retailer’s returns bench is buried under unopened parcels. On Monday a team of five, two packers, a supervisor, a planner and someone from customer service, walks the process and times it. On Tuesday they find that every parcel is opened, inspected, re-bagged and then sorted, with three trips to a shelving rack at the far wall.
On Wednesday they move the rack beside the bench and sort while inspecting. On Thursday they run the new layout all day and count: parcels per hour rise from 22 to 34. The supervisor presents the results on Friday morning, with a list of follow-up actions and owners.