ISO 14000 Standards and PDCA Cycle

ISO 14000 Standards

• ISO 14000 standards set out criteria for life-cycle analysis and provide a common language and terminology for environmental assessment and management worldwide.
• These standards can be used in conjunction with the ISO 14001 standard, providing organizations with greater insights and guidance to recognizable industry best practices.

Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle

• The PDCA cycle is a project management framework used to implement incremental change.
• It is a four-step approach: plan, do, check, and act, which is the most widely used methodology for implementing continuous improvement.
• The cycle is designed to help teams make small, incremental changes and test each step's success or failure before moving onto another one.

PDCA Cycle Steps

Step 1: Plan

• Identify a challenge or opportunity to overcome.
• Create an alternate version of the campaign or process.

Step 2: Do

• Test the idea for change through a small experiment or trial run.
• Carry out a real-world experiment to test the team's hypothesis.

Step 3: Check

• Gather and evaluate the small experiment results.
• Analyze the data to determine if the experiment was successful.

Step 4: Act

• Take action according to the insights gained after analyzing the experiment.
• Implement the change more broadly if it was successful, or return to the plan phase to try something else.

Accreditation

• Accreditation is a formal, independent verification that a program or institution meets established quality standards and is competent to carry out specific conformity assessment tasks.
• Accreditation is necessary to prove that an institution or program meets a general standard of quality.
• It is the act of granting credit or recognition, especially to an educational institution that maintains suitable standards.

Accreditation vs. Certification

• Accreditation is used to assess the quality of an institution or program, while certification is used to assess an individual's competency.
• Accreditation is a higher level of quality assurance that underpins the quality, impartiality, and competence of the certification process.
• Certification is an audit of whether an organization, product, or individual conforms to the criteria laid out in a recognized standard or scheme, such as ISO 14001 Environment Management Systems.

Learn about ISO 14000 standards for environmental assessment and management, and the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle for implementing incremental change.