B
Barahir
At our last surveillance audit, one of the nonconformities we received had to do with the ineffectiveness of our Corrective Action system.
No big suprise, that. CARs (Corrective Action Requests) were routinely ignored or pencil-whipped by supervisors because they had so many of them to deal with. They had so many of them to deal with because they weren't doing them effectively, because they didn't have time since there were so many to do because they weren't effective because....well, you get the point.
So we've made several changes, one of them being that instead of issuing the CAR to the responsible department with a due date we are having daily meetings (half hour or so, usually) where several of us meet to do the problem solving parts of our 8D corrective action (usually get us up through 4D or 5D if we're lucky). We implemented using the Fishbones and the Five Why methodology. It seems to have been very effective thus far - at least in determining root cause and figuring out which actions need to be taken to correct the issues. (Whether they'll follow through with the actions to make that effective as well remains to be seen.)
We were doing the ishikawas and five why's on a white board which got to be a pain in the rear afterwords when we had to retype everything. I looked around online for some usable templates and didn't really like any of them, so I made one myself in Publisher (I picked Publisher because of the auto-sizing of text to fit in text boxes). Now we can project against the white boards and not have to handwrite on the board followed by handwriting on a piece of paper followed by putting it on the Corrective Action form.
Since all of you fine folk here at Elsmar have been helpful to me over the last few years I figured I'd share the file for anyone who may be interested in it.
No big suprise, that. CARs (Corrective Action Requests) were routinely ignored or pencil-whipped by supervisors because they had so many of them to deal with. They had so many of them to deal with because they weren't doing them effectively, because they didn't have time since there were so many to do because they weren't effective because....well, you get the point.
So we've made several changes, one of them being that instead of issuing the CAR to the responsible department with a due date we are having daily meetings (half hour or so, usually) where several of us meet to do the problem solving parts of our 8D corrective action (usually get us up through 4D or 5D if we're lucky). We implemented using the Fishbones and the Five Why methodology. It seems to have been very effective thus far - at least in determining root cause and figuring out which actions need to be taken to correct the issues. (Whether they'll follow through with the actions to make that effective as well remains to be seen.)
We were doing the ishikawas and five why's on a white board which got to be a pain in the rear afterwords when we had to retype everything. I looked around online for some usable templates and didn't really like any of them, so I made one myself in Publisher (I picked Publisher because of the auto-sizing of text to fit in text boxes). Now we can project against the white boards and not have to handwrite on the board followed by handwriting on a piece of paper followed by putting it on the Corrective Action form.
Since all of you fine folk here at Elsmar have been helpful to me over the last few years I figured I'd share the file for anyone who may be interested in it.