Corrective Actions

Corrective actions connect to a nonconformance and an Owner in People. The record states the root cause, planned action and due date. Its status follows Planned, Approved, Implementing, effectiveness review and Closed. Those states let Quality Manager distinguish a planned response from an approved one, completed implementation from an effectiveness decision, and one finished action from a fully closed issue.

The correction workflow starts with an assigned owner submitting evidence for the action. It validates the retained root cause and approved action before moving the record to effectiveness review. An independent reviewer tests whether the action addressed the problem. The linked nonconformance can close only after every linked action has closed. That is the decision boundary the team should rehearse, especially when an issue needs more than one action.

• Plan. Quality Manager links the action to the issue, names the owner and captures the root cause, work and due date.
• Implement. The assigned owner carries out the approved work and submits the completed work for review.
• Verify. Quality Approver checks effectiveness independently and decides whether closure is justified.

The action text needs enough specificity to test. “Retrain staff” is hard to verify on its own; a concrete work instruction and a later observed result give the reviewer something to inspect. Use the linked inspection and nonconformance as the starting evidence, then document what changed and why it should prevent recurrence.

Define who can approve an action before implementation and how independent effectiveness review is assigned. The reviewer should not be the owner who submitted the completed work. Set a convention for due dates and for recording the completion date after the work is done. Establish what constitutes sufficient effectiveness evidence for different severities; the record’s action and root cause are the context for that decision.

Quality Manager should review actions due soon and those already in effectiveness review. The first group needs owner attention; the second needs a reviewer decision. Keeping the two queues separate prevents a completed task from being mistaken for a verified correction.

The surface defect on Q-104 produces a linked nonconformance. The owner records a root cause in the handling step and an approved action to change the handling method. After implementation, the owner submits the completed work for review. The workflow checks the retained root cause and approved action and moves the action into effectiveness review. Quality Approver compares the new result with the failed inspection evidence and decides whether the action was effective.

Now add a second action for the same issue, perhaps a revised check instruction. If the handling action closes but the instruction action remains under review, the nonconformance must remain open. Rehearse that case with the team. It tests the real closure rule and makes the reviewer’s authority visible where it matters.

• My corrective actions — Work linked to the signed-in owner’s issue and due date.
• Actions for effectiveness review — Submitted actions ready for the independent effectiveness decision.
• Open nonconformances — The source issues that remain active until every linked action closes.

See corrective action verification and the roles page.