Deming Cycle
The Deming circle shows that four types of activities are needed in a company:
Plan: Consider in advance which products or services will be delivered, and how they should be made. This activity is therefore an important part of that described above in organizing.
Do: Execute what has been devised in Plan (cooperate carefully).
Check: Check regularly whether what was devised in Plan has actually taken place in Do. If this is not the case, investigate why this is caused (for example: too ambitious processing times, too few or wrong machines, more customers and at different times than expected, changed customer wishes). Together with the following activity, this activity is the part of organizing that is not in Plan (being flexible).
Act: Do something with the findings from Check (for example in a management review); after all, it is not useful to simply establish that something did not go as expected, without examining whether this can be avoided in the future. This means that changes must be made to Plan (or to the organization).
It is not without reason that the Deming circle is a circle: after Act’s decision-making process, a new plan will have to be made (read: adjustments must be devised), after which this will be carried out, the feasibility checked and actions taken accordingly. And so on and so on.