SC QUALITY GUILDKaizen event and PDCA planner
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Plan a kaizen blitz as a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, with a prediction written down first and the result compared against it.
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Kaizen and kaizen blitz
Kaizen means continuous improvement through small, steady changes made by the people who do the work. A kaizen blitz or kaizen event is a short, intense version: a small team, mostly from the area, spends three to five days on one tightly scoped problem, makes the changes during the event and leaves a list of follow-up actions to finish within about 30 days.
Plan-Do-Check-Act
PDCA, popularized by W. Edwards Deming from Walter Shewhart's work, is the cycle inside every kaizen:
- Plan: describe the problem, choose a change, and predict what it will do.
- Do: make the change, ideally on a small scale, and record what was actually done.
- Check: measure the result and compare it with the prediction.
- Act: adopt the change and standardize it, adapt it and run another cycle, or abandon it.
Deming later preferred "Study" to "Check" (PDSA), to stress learning from the gap rather than ticking a box.
Why the prediction matters
If you do not write down what you expect before you start, any result can be read as success. The prediction is what turns the cycle into a test of your understanding. When the result is close to it, the team understood the process. When it is far off, in either direction, something about the process is not as the team thought, and that is worth knowing before standardizing.
Standardize or it drifts back
A change that is adopted but never written into the work instruction or control plan tends to fade within weeks. The tool flags an "adopt" decision with nothing recorded under how it will be standardized.
On the Yellow Belt exam
Kaizen and kaizen blitz (V.A.1) and PDCA (V.A.2) are in the 2022 CSSYB Body of Knowledge.