ISO 9000:2015 defines the correction as follows:
Corrective Action: Action to eliminate the cause of a nonconformity and to prevent recurrence.
Corrective Action is the act of taking corrective measures to prevent reoccurrences of a problem. It is performed after the occurrence of a defect.
To prevent the reoccurrence of a problem, you are required to understand the root cause of the problem and take necessary actions to eliminate that root cause. This will ensure that the problem does not happen again in future.
Unacceptable Corrective Actions
In this post, I am not suggesting how to conduct the root cause analysis and the acceptable actions to eliminate the root cause. Instead, I want to highlight some of the actions that should never be accepted.
Let's look at some of them:
- This was a human error, and the training was provided to the operator
- The person who made a mistake has been moved to a different department
- The operator has been warned
- That employee is no more with the company. We fired him!
- Additional human resources have been added to that process
- More inspectors have been addedAs you can see, these are obviously not the root cause of a problem. Using a simple approach of 5 Whys could have led to much better actions than what you see here.
So next time you see these types of actions as a response to the corrective actions, your answer should be to reject that corrective action response. It would be best to ask for a more thorough root cause analysis of the problem.
