Using PDCA Complete to Streamline Your Business Processes

There are numerous practical and easy to use methods to improve business processes, some might say that there are too many! For many of us, choosing the right mix for our business can be an interesting challenge. Most of us just want to grab hold of an approach that works, apply it to our businesses, and then get on with our day jobs!

This was the challenge that we considered when we developed PDCA Complete. How can we take away as much effort as possible, so that you can have a straightforward, effective, process improvement experience? This article takes you through some of the functionality of using PDCA Complete to help explain how we met this challenge.

Using PDCA Complete Waste Walk

Lets start with the waste walking element of PDCA Complete. The waste walking method gets your teams involved with Lean / Continuous Improvement. It gives them a voice and helps you, to see things that would otherwise pass you by. If you haven't come across waste walking then I recommend that you read the waste walking article too.

When using PDCA Complete, we make it easy for you to add your issues with a mobile tablet or laptop. As your team walks the process they can quickly capture the wasteful activity present within the business; whether it be defect producing activities and delays or overproduction and inventory issues. This is just one way that PDCA Complete can reduce the amount of effort it takes to get started with improving your business processes.

Once you have completed your waste walk, and you have debriefed the walk with your team, you can quickly create improvement actions within the software. I'll come back to the topic of managing actions in a moment - which is a really powerful function of the software.

CCC

Another tool for using PDCA Complete, which can help you to use the findings of your corrective actions to an even better degree, is the CCC approach. CCC stands for Concern, Cause and Countermeasure. This brilliantly simple method further engages your team with generating improvements. This tried and tested approach, when done right, can yield even more improvement opportunities.

The CCC approach can also be used on its own to start an improvement conversation. It really helps focus the team's mind on improving a very specific part of your business.

PDCA Complete enables insights about the process gained from using the CCC tool and then converted into improvement actions. PDCA Complete collects all these actions with the previous actions. Now your ready for the next stage of the improvement process - evaluation and prioritization.

BCS

Now that you have a compendium of improvement actions that you can follow up on, the question becomes 'where do I start?'. This is another challenge that faces anyone who leads an improvement activity. We built this principle into the PDCA Complete software.  We wanted the software to  inform the person using PDCA Complete about the most effective way for them to use their time and resources to improve the business process in question. The result of this thinking was the inclusion of our BCS scoring system.

BCS is an acronym for Benefit, Cost and Speed. It is a simple approach that is similar to that used in FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) or with Health and Safety risk assessments. You can learn more about this approach in the BCS article In summary you evaluate each improvement opportunity against the three factors of Benefit, Cost and Speed (each one scored out of 10 using our suggested scale) and PDCA Complete multiplies the scores together to give a BCS score out of 1000. These scores can then be ranked in descending order to give you the 'biggest bang for your buck'.

From your Bucket list, you can easily launch the item into any of the PDCA Complete modules.

My Tasks

By using PDCA Complete you get a task list for your actions that allows you to generate reports based on different criteria. This My Tasks list aids the simple and effective management of all of the different improvement actions that you and your team generated through the course of the analysis exercises.

From feedback we got during the testing and development phase of PDCA Complete, we found this really did help reduce the time and confusion of managing multiple projects and improvement activities at once.

Instead of having numerous plans scattered around your office, or trying to figure out relative priorities (for already stretched team members), PDCA Complete allows you to have everything in one place. Whether you want to review your actions from a BCS score perspective, or from a completion date perspective, or by individual, PDCA Complete can take the effort out of the administration of change actions.

There are even more ways to use the actions element of PDCA Complete; these are explained in PDCA Complete features.

One thing that PDCA Complete doesn't do is help your team celebrate when you successfully improve your businesses processes. We're going to have to leave that one to you!

If you have any questions about PDCA Complete then please check out our features page and introductory videos found on each supporting feature page.

Have fun improving your processes.