When the 2015 version was introduced, Nigel Croft, the chairman of TC-176 (the committee that writes the ISO 9001 standard), explained that preventive action had not lived up to its mission.
This is my nomination in the category of "Understatement of the Decade, Quality division".
I struggle (daily) with trying to drive peers/reports/organization towards a more mature (in the
organizational sense) set of behaviors; one of the foundational (inertial?) artifacts that I feel works against me is when there is no recognizable difference between
corrective action and
preventive action. Once there is no daylight between CA and PA (in understanding or implementation) it is only a matter of time before an organization slips into VERY dangerous modes of thinking; in particular I have observed that once a (nominally) "defined" quality system begins to treat CA and PA the same, there develops a strong desire to treat
every non-conformance (no matter if it falls within well-predicted failure rates, or is attributable to a single, specific cause) as worthy of inclusion in a CA process. I see this as backsliding towards a
reactionary approach, which I abhor. YMMV.
Preventive Action - the nonconformance has not yet occurred. There are many actions that are preventative:
FMEA, 5S, Lean, most controls like SPC and mistake proofing (which can also be a corrective action if the nonconformance has occurred), preventive maintenance etc..
As such there is no real form required for these types of actions. They are so different from each other that a single form won’t work and collecting all of those actions separately is wasteful.
The final bit of
@Bev D post is what I see as the reason why so many organizations struggle with the difference between CA and PA. Both CA and PA require
critical thinking, but any individual PA is only rarely going to look like any other PA... in implementation. Too many folks with "quality" in their title are uncomfortable when
one thing doesn't look like
something else. It is a (poorly motivated, IMO) desire to avoid discomfort that leads to rigidity of thought (stifling critical thinking) and eventually "cut-and-paste" approaches to problems (e.g. cargo cult-like "solutions").