Corrective Action Preventive Action (CAPA) is a risk management approach that considers issues and their root causes, and seeks to develop solutions that prevent that issue or cause.
CAPA is essentially the action-taking step - the process of identifying and taking the best action to improve processes and eliminate the causes of flaws in business systems.
Here are 5 ways to make the CAPA process more transparent:
1. Ensure employee involvement
CAPA is all about identifying and dealing with the causes of issues or failures in business processes. Although management has an overview of these processes, employees are always in the mix of things in an organisation.
Your employees are the ones who get the work done and deal with the nitty-gritty of work procedures. This makes it important to involve employees and field workers’ observations to find the root causes of mistakes and failures.
2. Establish an accessible and transparent issue-reporting system
There is no use in identifying causes or encouraging workers to do the same if you do not establish a means to assess if those issues are addressed.
Thus, you must set up an efficient issue-reporting system or quality management platform. This will ensure better reporting of issues as well as efficient tracking of the feedback and actions taken to deal with those issues.
3. Appoint a CAPA representative
Part of your system should involve electing an individual to manage the CAPA process. Having somebody that people can direct their questions and reports to ensures that the CAPA system functions smoothly.
It also increases accessibility and accountability about the direction of the CAPA process. And, it means that the representative can ensure the transparency of CAPA in the organisation.
4. Establish CAPA goals and KPIs
With a system in place and somebody to manage it, it’s important to know what you want to get out of CAPA. Of course, there are basic benefits that most companies want to get out of it. These include better risk management capabilities, quality management, Six Sigma benefits, and more.
Setting clear goals also makes it easier for everybody in your organisation to remain on the same page.
5. Record and share lessons learned
Openly sharing the goals of your organisation in implementing CAPA also means you should be open about the repercussions of the system and the lessons learned from it.
Notify employees of the causes identified and the prescribed actions to solve the causes. The whole point of CAPA is to deal with the causes of issues in business processes. Thus, sharing lessons learned is an integral part of the system.
Final Thoughts
CAPA enhances productivity, efficiency and quality in an organisation. With a CAPA system, companies can improve internal processes. However, this is not possible without transparency and accountability - from both employees and management.
Employees need to be transparent about any irregularities they come across. Managers need to be transparent about CAPA overall - goals, KPIs, actions, and discoveries.
Use the five tips above to promote this transparency and establish an effective CAPA system for your organisation.
Are you looking for a tool to enable, record and monitor CAPA or other quality processes in your organisation? Falcony | Audit ticks all the boxes for quality reporting, analytics and follow-up actions. Is easy to customise, enables real dialogue and is a lot more.
We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
