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This book provides a conceptual description of the PDCA cycle and the tools that support it. A brief literature review is given for each tool, indicating the timeline according to Scopus, the main areas in which they are applied, the main authors and the journals that most publish on these topics. It reports three industrial applications, one focusing on cost reduction, the second on optimizing a manufacturing company's raw material receiving process, and the third one on eliminating waste and increasing performance.
Lean Manufacturing (LM) is a production philosophy that integrates tools focused on eliminating waste. Traditionally, LM is represented by a house that integrates basic tools and pillars that support the flow of materials, quality assurance, manufacturing systems, and human resources.
The basic LM tools are focused on the standardization of the production system, among which are the visual factory, 5S, Kaizen, total productive maintenance and six sigma, to mention just a few. The pillar associated with production flow are tools such as SMED, Kanban, push systems, and just-in-time, among others; the pillar associated with quality assurance is made up of tools such as poka-yoke, quality at the source, value stream mapping, total quality management, among others, while the tools associated with manufacturing systems are made up of Layout, batch production, cellular manufacturing, multifunctional work areas, among others.
A tool considered the origin of many others refers to the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, which is used for problem-solving and improvement in production systems. This tool has proven its efficiency over the years in different industrial sectors due to its simple and easy application, and unfortunately, it is often ignored or under-appreciated. This book aims to provide a conceptual description of the PDCA cycle and the tools that support it and to report some examples. The book consists of four chapters, which are described below.
The Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, also known as the Deming cycle, is a lean manufacturing tool; more specifically, it is a quality management system applied in various sectors such as manufacturing, services, offshore, project areas, organizations, among others. The PDCA cycle was popularized by Edwards Deming, an American expert in quality management.
In its early days, PDCA was used as a tool for product quality control, and currently, it is one of the most well-known and widely used methods through which quality tools can be applied in the operations of a manufacturing process. This method is useful for making continuous, incremental, rapid and effective improvements without large capital investments at the organizational level; as compared to other methods, it is less complicated and costly. The PDCA cycle consists of four phases: Plan, Do, Check, and Act