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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Ben Hershey, CEO The 4Ward Group of Companies, LLC
Adverti$er
April 2020 #12249 Page #28
As the Market Changes – Plan Now for Continuous Improvements
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o doubt that as I am writing this, many of us have had to turn our focus to our families, our friends, and our businesses as the COVID-19 virus has rapidly spread throughout North America. The impact to many has been requirements to shelter families in their homes, except for critical functions which in many cases has included building components and suppling building products for home construction. It was just a short twelve years ago that we all thought/hoped we would never see such a major change to normal business operations again, but here we are. The good news though is that the balance sheets of banks and most businesses are very strong, and our businesses should be able to come out of this eventually. While we find ourselves in an upheaval like this, it is a good time to evaluate what is working and what is not. Though I know many of you have been quite busy over the past few weeks (much like our team has been extremely busy), we’ll need to take time to go back and check on the progress of our continuous improvement efforts; a check-up. For this, a good method you can use to enable your team to improve processes and products continuously is the PDCA, Plan-Do-Check-Act. Explained briefly, a Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle is a model for carrying out change. It is an essential part of the lean manufacturing philosophy and a key for continuous improvement of people and processes. First proposed by Walter Shewhart and later developed by William Deming, the PDCA cycle became a widespread framework for constant improvements in manufacturing, management, and other areas. PDCA is a simple four-stage method that enables teams to avoid recurring mistakes and improve processes. The PDCA cycle is an iterative approach for continually improving products, people, and services. For example, imagine that you have several complaints about the slow response rate of your support team to the production line. You probably will need to improve the way your team works in order to keep the production line satisfied; this is the point where PDCA comes into play.
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