Hi readers! Today well discuss about PDCA cycle. P- Plan , D – Do , C- Check , A- Act . It is a useful tool used in process improvement project like Quality circle, Six Sigma, TPM SGA etc.
Let’s understand with a simple example. There was a tea making shop. They used to prepare tea (with simple composition of Milk, Tea leaf and sugar). Average selling of Tea was approximately around 5000 cups daily and revenue generation amounted to 25K INR on daily basis. Over a period of time, the Shop owner noticed that the customer foot fall was more than 6500 but the sale was not actually proportionate to the actual number of customer footfall. He further analysed and found that customers were demanding different varieties and flavours of tea like Black tea, Ginger Tea, Masala tea etc. And due to unavailability of different types of tea, customer footfall did not actually convert into generation of revenue for the shop. Shop owner thought and planned to change and prepare new recipes of tea according to customer’s demand. Shop owner is the analytical person so he will follow PCDA methodology.
Plan – To fulfil the customer’s demand, Shop owner sat with his shop staffs and brainstormed about how to prepare different types of tea, their recipe, taste etc.
Shop owner changed his of simple tea with ginger Tea, Masala Tea & Green tea. After changing some of the ingredients , he finalized the recipe of different type of tea.
Do – Now with the help of tea maker operator, shop owner made different type of tea following the recipe that he made. While making the tea he also fixed critical parameters like Temperature ,colour and flavour of the tea. He made some experiments and some trails were also carried out.
Check – In check part, all the key performance indicators like Taste, colour, Quantity is checked by shop’s internal team with help of some datasheets and control chart. Shop owner also took feedback of different varieties of tea served free of cost to different customers. Feedback data is analysed with the help of a graph.
Act – After successful trails, Tea making process is finally standardised. Shop owner is now selling different types of tea. Customer feedback form is placed in shop for further improvement in quality of Tea and achieving customer demand and satisfaction. Again it will follow the PDCA cycle if required for further improvement.
Now the sale of the Shop has increased to 7000 cups per day and revenue generation also touched around 40K INR approx. This is a good example of implementation of PDCA and its benefit.
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