Performing the Right Corrective Action

When something doesn’t work as expected, it is a failure. A common response to a failure by an organization is to restore the system or remedy the situation.

Each failure is unique to the product, industry, customer situation, expectations, etc. Selecting the appropriate response or corrective action when confronted with a failure may or may not be obvious.

Selecting the right corrective action depends on the business and legal factors, along with customer expectations.

For a given failure, thinking through the range of possible responses and selecting the right one takes care to meet the various stakeholder’s requirements or expectations.

The range of possible corrective actions

For products that fail for the customer the options for corrective action may include:

• Do nothing
• Provide spare or replacement parts
• Offer repair, patch, or workaround
• Full replacement and refund
• Partial or total recall

For processes (assembly lines, for example) that experience a failure, the remedial options include:

• Do nothing
• Inspect and rework/scrap faulty items
• Implement process control and improve/stabilize the process
• Redesign the process
• Change suppliers, equipment, or design

When a prototype fails during development, the response options include:

• Do nothing
• Inspect and segregate faulty units for alternative uses
• Implement a workaround or patch
• Rework, repair faulty units
• Implement process control and improve/stabilize the process
• Redesign the process
• Change suppliers, equipment, or design and build new prototypes

Criteria for the scope and timeliness of the corrective action

As you know, not all failures have the same consequence.

Some failures require a careful inspection to detect, while others may cause serious harm to personnel or equipment.

The nature of the failure determines the scope of the corrective action. Another way to consider this factor is to fit the response to the seriousness of the failure consequence.

• Safety
• Major Loss or Significant Material Damage
• Loss of primary function
• Loss of secondary function
• Annoyance
• No effect

When to implement the corrective action

The timeliness of the response becomes immediate for safety-related failures and becomes as economically feasible for the insignificant failure consequence issues.

Another factor with timeliness is the exposure.

How many items are at risk of failure when the initial failures are detected? The idea is to effect a correction action on as few items as possible, thus it may be necessary to move quickly to implement corrective action to avoid additional failures.

For high volume consumer products, if the corrective action addresses a safety issue, you may need to stop production, quarantine and rework finished goods, and implement a recall to replace or repair sold items.

If the issue is not urgent, I.e. Not a safety-related issue, then the corrective action may roll into production and minimize scraping or repairing existing items and not implement a recall.

Of course, the cost of failure factors into the right decision on selecting the corrective action and when and how to implement it.

For items that are not safety hazard related the decision on the appropriate corrective action includes considering the cost of the failure to the customer (major dissatisfaction contributor) and the cost of the failure to the organization.

Consider the cost to implement the corrective action against the savings by avoiding future failures.

In some cases it is possible to forestall corrective action as the future cost of failures is less than the cost to implement a solution, even considering the cost to the customer and hit to customer satisfaction.

Keep in mind that if working to address a failure within a manufacturing process or development prototype, the same considerations apply.

The customer may not be the end user of the product, yet should remain a consideration along with manufacturing yield or prototype functionality.