Corrective Action / Preventive Action
CA/PA helps with all issues. You identify and track corrective actions at your site. You can use issues that impact food safety and quality to help drive improvements to your programs and processes.
When you have an event, you identify the issue, complete and record the “corrective” action. From there you want to look at what the root cause of the event was. Using the 5 whys is a great tool but there are several ways to drill back and find the root of the problem. Once you think you’ve found the root cause identity “preventive” actions to put in place to ensure the issue doesn’t reoccur. Once you’ve identified the actions needed add target completion dates and make sure to communicate the action items to the individuals assigned. 3-6 months after the action items have been completed go back and verify the effectiveness of the actions put in place. This closes out your CAPA. If the actions weren’t successful take another look at the root cause and the effectiveness of the assigned action items.
Log the issues, use details like date the issue occurred, the department or site the event occurred, the specification, procedure, policy or regulatory requirement the nonconformity or event violated. You can use that to look at trends to identify improvements.
