617 Managing Safety and Health- General Industry

Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement is an ongoing effort to enhance processes, products, or services by making incremental changes over time or through breakthrough innovations. It focuses on identifying inefficiencies, reducing waste, and fostering a culture of learning and adaptability.

Rooted in methodologies like Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) and Lean principles, continuous improvement aims to achieve higher long-term systems improvement in quality, greater efficiency, and sustained growth while involving employees at all levels in the improvement process.

The Deming Cycle

Dr. Deming developed a continuous improvement process called the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) Cycle . The PDSA Cycle contains four primary steps. These four steps are repeated as part of a never-ending cycle of continuous improvement.

1. Plan: Identify a safety goal or purpose, objectives, questions to ask/answer, and develop a plan to carry out the cycle (who, what, where, when, why). Determine what you are trying to accomplish, how you know that a change is an improvement, and what changes can you make you believe will cause improvement.
2. Do: Carry out the plan. Document the problems and unexpected observations and begin to analyze the data.
3. Study: Monitor the outcomes of the change to test their validity. Implement the change or test on a small scale to limit variables. Look for signs of progress and success, or problems and areas for improvement. Complete the data analysis, compare the data to predictions, and summarize what you learn.
4. Act: Integrate the change into the entire process. Use what you learn to adjust the goal, change methods, or even reformulate a theory altogether.
• If the safety procedure works, keep it.
• If the procedures need improvement, continue the cycle by going back to step 1 and make minor changes.
• If the procedure does not work at all, throw it out and start over.

If you really want to dig into this topic, go to the Dr. Deming's Website and read Circling Back: Clearing up myths about the Deming Cycle and seeing how it keeps evolving.

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