Preventive Action (PA) and Corrective Action (CA) - One or Two Procedures?

In fact, there should be 2 distinct procedures. given they are different in treatment. Corrective action procedure should provide a framework to prevent a non conformity or a complaint from recurring whilst a preventive action prevents an action from occuring.

Good practice, there should be 2 procedures

Dharmanand

I'm finally getting some time to trawl through the old stuff. Forgive me if this has been stated before but I'm responding as I go!

Pennington said:

ISO 9001:2000 places CA under Improvement which is not strictly correct. Both Deming and Juran would argue that CA is not improvement because what it does is bring the process back to where it should have been in the first place. CA would therefore appear to serve process control rather than inprovement.

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If a process brings forth nonconformity then the process needs corrective action. This corrective action 'shall take action to eliminate the cause of the nonconformity in order to prevent recurrence'. The process must have had faults to allow the nonconformity to happen - insufficient checks, lack of golden sample, improper training, etc. With this in mind the process should and will be improved upon if you have managed to get to the root cause. Otherwise you are just fire fighting. Corrective action should always be improvement!

Sorry, I know these are old but...

Rachel said:

Preventive action: what you do to pinpoint problems *before* they start...the key here is that preventive actions are not triggered by a non-conformance.

But, then, is that 100% true??? (Specifically, that NCs can't generate PAs?)

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ddhartma said:

So if I'm running a control chart at my machine and I have noted that the last several measurements are moving towards the upper control limit, according to your position noted above any adjustment is a "corrective action" and not "preventive" even though no nonconformity has occurred and in-fact my actions have "prevented" one from occurring. Or did I misunderstand?

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Preventive action is what you do to stop a nonconformity from happening. In general this would take place in audits, process reviews - like your control chart - and at any other time. We have a staff suggestion book so that anyone can submit improvements in practice, etc. Preventive action procedures may raise nonconformity. If something is within control parameters then it is not a nonconformity. Taking action to improve its standing within those control limits - to make a better product - is preventive action. Only if the measurements had passed outside those control limits would it have been a nonconformity. Preventive action picks up the things that could become a nonconformity. What you do to correct the issue is then a corrective action.

Corrective Action - something has gone wrong. Get to the root of the problem, sort it out, improve the controls in place so that it doesn't happen again.
Preventive Action - nothing has gone wrong yet but were gonna look anyway and make it better! While we're there we'll fix the things that might be about to break.

For me they are one and the same. It is just the trigger point that is different.

Yes we are alo having one procedure for corrective and preventive actions in our organization.....

Engr.gauravnarula said:

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Dear subscriber,
Please indicate why you are so satisfied. I am convinced it is worthwhile to know this. Otherwise this answer does not contribute to making improvements of system performance.

I don't think it matters how you describe what you do. The common problem I see as an auditor is lack of a clear initiation for preventive actions. We seem to be stuck in the 80's with prevention as an afterthought to corrective actions.

Most organizations seem to have a reactive approach to prevention and limit its application to a complaint or quality spill, if they remember to do it. I often see a CAR/PAR log with 50 CAR's and no PAR's.

ChuckHughes said:

I don't think it matters how you describe what you do. The common problem I see as an auditor is lack of a clear initiation for preventive actions. We seem to be stuck in the 80's with prevention as an afterthought to corrective actions.

Most organizations seem to have a reactive approach to prevention and limit its application to a complaint or quality spill, if they remember to do it. I often see a CAR/PAR log with 50 CAR's and no PAR's.

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Well said.

I'm late also, EC newbie. Peter has made some salient points. Is it productive to have others in the organization trying to determine whether an action is Corrective or Preventive? In the past I have used a single Action Form with a box "for Quality Dept. use only" to identify the nature of the action, C or P.

I agree with Peter that PAs are an effective risk management tool. Initially I found myself focusing on manufacturing processes but as my employers and clients needs changed I found myself addressing more and more business processes in order to support operational goals.

As a result of my experiences I have come to believe that:

Operational definitions are critical to ensure that we are all on the same page.

Whenever a business process crosses functional lines that crossing yields opportunities for improvement actions.

Internal process inputs and outputs MUST support operational goals.

Gotta run, so I'm cutting this short.

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Regards,

Dan
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