Corrective and Preventive Action - One Procedure or Two?

[Viki N.]

Energy (and others),

At what point do you do formal (i.e. written) CA's vs. just discussing the issue among the applicable parties and handling it informally? I tend to reserve formal CA's for "larger" problems, "smaller" problems which could have easily been much "larger", recurrent "smaller" problems, and/or customer complaints. It might not be ideal, but I'm always willing to listen to others' ideas.

Mike,
We pretty much handle CA's the way your company does. We do, however, use an internal type of form called a Discrepancy Notice for the "smaller", internal-type problems. If these problems reoccur or show trends they typically will be formally written. Customer Complaints, audit (internal/3rd party) findings, etc. are other formally written CA's.
Viki