johnnybegood said:
My next question is on the CA. Very often the auditee did not provide CA timely. Though we did not spell out the time frame in responding the NCR, I find it very tiring to follow up for the NRC closure. Is there and guideline on the NCR respond time? 1 week, 2 weeks? Pls. advise.
I won't spend a lot of time on whether or not you can request a corrective action be done, you've gotten good info from others.
As far as timely response to corrective action requests, you do have the right to expect answers, but you need to make sure that your time frames are documented.
As background: What I have found throughout the years is that people confuse investigation with corrective action. You want to set deadlines of when you expect an investigation to be done and documented. From there, it will be decided what actions are required and those actions must also have their own due dates. It is not always possible to complete ALL corrective actions in a week or two. Some may take a year or more.
And so, set a due date for investigation results and a corrective action plan to be submitted. We use 1 week for a major (high priority), 2 weeks for a normal priority item, and 3 weeks for a low priority item. The priorities are set by the auditor (originator), myself, and manager of the area involved. By the due date, I expect to see an investigation documented along with identification of the root cause and some sort of action plan. Those actions do not need to all be recorded, but a plan does.
The next step, is to coordinate documenting the actual corrective actions needed and to set due dates for each. Make them realistic, if you are purchasing big ticket production equipment to correct a problem, don't say the corrective action will be done tomorrow, it takes time to research, purchase, build, ship, install and test something like that for capability. On the other hand, if you just need to create new or revised documentation, you sholdn't need a month to do it. (the sandbagger effect
)
I have found that if you get everyone submitting their investigations on time, the scheduling of corrective actions becomes more second nature to people, it is mostly just a matter of discipline. Do not be afraid of bringing up names when you have folks that don't do their part. If you are sitting in your steering committee meetings and one area is always ignoring deadlines, peer pressure may work to your advantage
Good luck, it takes a while to get everyone on board. BTW, the SPC problem you encountered is pretty common, there is always one, I once had a guy that would take all his charts home and fill them in during the weekend! I solved that one by going real-time with data collection SPC software.
