Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) is a four-step continuous improvement cycle that underpins safety management systems such as ISO 45001 and ANSI Z10.
Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) is a four-step cycle for continuous improvement. Teams plan a change based on identified risks and objectives, do the change, check the results against the plan and act on what they learned by standardizing what worked or adjusting what didn't. The cycle then repeats. PDCA was popularized by W. Edwards Deming, building on Walter Shewhart's work, and is sometimes called the Deming cycle or Plan-Do-Study-Act.
In safety, PDCA is the backbone of occupational health and safety management systems. ISO 45001 and ANSI/ASSP Z10 both follow PDCA, so a safety program becomes a system that improves over time rather than a static set of rules.
A warehouse sees rising forklift near misses. The team plans to add pedestrian walkways and speed limits, does a 60-day trial in one zone, checks near-miss reports and observations, and acts by rolling the controls out site-wide after near misses in the trial zone fall sharply.
They are closely related. Deming preferred "Study" over "Check" to stress learning from results rather than simply inspecting them, but both describe the same cycle.
ISO 45001's clauses are organized around PDCA: planning (clause 6), support and operation (clauses 7 and 8), performance evaluation (clause 9) and improvement (clause 10).
Continuously. Small improvements can cycle in weeks, while system-level reviews often follow an annual management review.
Part of SafetyIQ's EHS glossary: plain-English definitions of workplace health and safety terms.
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