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The Deming Cycle

The document discusses W. Edwards Deming's proposal that businesses analyze processes to identify variations causing deviations from customer requirements, and place processes in a continuous feedback loop to identify improvements. It describes Deming's PDCA cycle of Plan, Do, Check, Act and how it can be applied at both operational and strategic levels in businesses.

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Eva Acedera Mella
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105 views

The Deming Cycle

The document discusses W. Edwards Deming's proposal that businesses analyze processes to identify variations causing deviations from customer requirements, and place processes in a continuous feedback loop to identify improvements. It describes Deming's PDCA cycle of Plan, Do, Check, Act and how it can be applied at both operational and strategic levels in businesses.

Uploaded by

Eva Acedera Mella
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Deming Cycle

By Paul Arveson

W. Edwards Deming in the 1950's proposed that business processes should be analyzed and measured to identify sources of
variations that cause products to deviate from customer requirements. He recommended that business processes be placed
in a continuous feedback loop so that managers can identify and change the parts of the process that need improvements.
As a teacher, Deming created a (rather oversimplified) diagram to illustrate this continuous process, commonly known as
the PDCA cycle for Plan, Do, Check, Act*:

 PLAN: Design or revise business process components to improve results


 DO: Implement the plan and measure its performance
 CHECK: Assess the measurements and report the results to decision makers
 ACT: Decide on changes needed to improve the process

Deming's PDCA cycle can be illustrated as follows:

Deming's focus was on industrial production processes, and the level of improvements he sought were on the level of
production. In the modern post-industrial company, these kinds of improvements are still needed but the real performance
drivers often occur on the level of business strategy. Strategic deployment is another process, but it has relatively longer-
term variations because large companies cannot change as rapidly as small business units. Still, strategic initiatives can and
should be placed in a feedback loop, complete with measurements and planning linked in a PDCA cycle. To illustrate the
relationship of business unit processes to strategic processes, we may construct two nested PDCA cycles:
This 'wheel within a wheel' describes the relationship between strategic management and business unit management in a
large company. There are actually several separate business units, of course, each with its own set of metrics, goals, targets
and initiatives. But this figure illustrates the idea that the business activities constitute the DO part of the overall strategic
effort.

* Note: The PDCA cycle was in fact originally developed by Walter A, Shewhart, a Bell Laboratories scientist who was
Deming's friend and mentor, and the developer of Statistical Process Control (SPC) in the late 1920s.  So sometimes this is
referred to as the "Shewhart Cycle".  There are also several recent variations on this concept.   See The Man Who
Discovered Quality by A. Gabor, Penguin Books, 1990.

©1998 Paul Arveson

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