Corrective action management is important

In any organization, it's essential to identify and solve all issues quickly.

Issues and risks can become opportunities to be more competitive if they are fixed effectively. Compliance obligations also mandate that many organizations manage issues and keep records of what was found and done to fix them.

Once identified, it becomes an essential business task to record and solve issues and risks as quickly as possible. The process of capturing issues and turning these into improvements can be known as Corrective Action Management or Continuous improvement. There are also many other names for this common process.

Improve faster than your competitors

Clearly defining how problems and risks are reported, investigated and recorded will promote faster and better corrective actions. A robust and well-defined corrective action system allows organizations to monitor and measure the progress of improvement while providing a structured framework to follow.

Smaller organizations can find it easier to identify issues and solve them quickly. Larger organizations can find issue management harder to control, requiring robust systems to help keep improvement actions flowing.

Corrective action systems can be implemented in many ways. Paper systems, spreadsheets, and software are all popular. Organizations must recognize, define and monitor their improvement processes to maintain their competitive edge.

Improvement opportunities can be identified from many sources

Once recorded, these can then be managed by the organization to maximize benefit.

Corrective action tasks can be generated from many sources. Here are some examples:

• Employees recognize an issue or risk
• Customer and product feedback
• Compliance audits etc.

The easy capture and recording of issues is key to an effective Corrective Action Management system.

Software-based Corrective Action Systems can be better

The use of software to automate the corrective action management process is much more common due to the increased reliability of computer and data storage systems.

Software-based corrective action systems are less expensive to run, quicker and compliant. Sometimes these can be offered free to small organizations.

The Corrective Action life cycle is very simple

A typical corrective action system workflow should go something like this:

• A problem is identified and recorded in the corrective action system
• Assign responsibility to solve the problem
• Investigate and solve the problem (usually through a predefined process like 8-step problem solving)
• Keep a record of what happened and what was done
• The task is closed

Click here to see a detailed Corrective Action process map

Corrective action systems help organizations evolve

Effective corrective action systems keep organizations efficient and competitive by driving continuous improvement at all levels across the organization. The better an organization is at removing issues and risks, the faster it can respond and adapt to market and product changes while ensuring maximum operational efficiency.