Chevron HSEQ

Chevron HSEQ
HSEQ Management Systems Consulting

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Corrective Action

Stuff ups in day to day business are inevitable. How you deal with them and use those stuff ups to improve your systems often means the difference between a good business and a great business.

Take a moment to think of the three biggest things in your business that always seem to have problems. Have you done a proper root cause analysis on these issues to see what the deeper issue is? Often the cause of the problem is not what you think.

You don't have to have a Quality Management System in place to implement a good corrective action system, all you need is a way of recording issues, analysing the root cause and implementing short and long term solutions.

The best place to start is with a register for customer complaints and feedback. Record all feedback for a 6 month period and look for trends. Perhaps one employee receives more complaints than others. The root cause analysis may show that the problem is not the employee but their lack of training. Once you know this information you can develop short and long term solutions to help combat the issue.

2 comments:

  1. True, there is no need to have a QMS in order to enforce a corrective action plan, as the latter is not under the scope of the former. Besides that, QMS pertains mostly to guidelines for production/ output, whereas corrective action concerns the actions of the employee.

    Rigoberto Stokes

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  2. It is important to establish a corrective action plan throughout the organization, because correcting and preventing problems and mistakes early will cost much lesser than fixing them later. And yes, the QMS only falls down to the organizations’ quality and efficiency, not to employee shortcomings.

    Barton Wilson

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