AN EXAMINATION OF THE APPLICATION OF PLAN-DO-CHECK-ACT CYCLE IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle is a high level methodology for achieving continuous improvement that has been a basic element of the total quality management movement. It is a practical tool and is widely adopted in the automotive sector as an improvement tool to managing improvement projects especially within manufacturing. The aim of this paper is to evaluate how the continuous improvement processes are conducted compared to the PDCA cycle and to better understand the improvement processes in a PD environment. The results from the case study shows that the PDCA cycle is not always followed precisely according to the formally described quality assurance system in the companies. Nevertheless, the case companies emphasizes that they naturally, as engineers, do improvements every day. The companies have according to our evaluations never given the PDCA method a proper chance to prove its usefulness in PD. Consequently, the companies claim that the method will be most suitable when the problem to be analyzed is sufficiently complex, when there are no time constraints and enough resources to spend on the problem.

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