I recently
read a piece where some well-intended quality professionals were asked to explain
the difference between “correction” and “corrective action.” I got a weird feeling. Why are we even having these discussions?
What happen? The battle is to get Executives
to understand the benefits of a robust quality management process in order to
support corporate goals and objectives.
It is about increasing revenue and lowering costs and lowering risks.
Back in the early
eighties, after spending six years in the automotive industry, I switched to
the aerospace industry. I was pleasantly surprised to see a better approach
to quality. At that time, the automotive
industry had a bunch of “tools” that were being randomly applied. Aerospace had the benefits of military based
quality management system processes.
Note for the young people, this is before ISO9000.
The
aerospace industry simply defined two steps (reference MIL-STD-1520)
- Disposition – what should I do to fix the NCM- Corrective Action – selective application of problem solving efforts to those areas with the highest potential payback, and always for safety related problems
Then we started
doing some dumb stuff. Someone demanded corrective
action for every NCM. The response was “tool broke, tool replaced”
or “operator error, operated trained.” Anything
was written into the form in order to get the parts moving again. Then, we changed to “immediate corrective
action” and “root cause corrective action.”
Immediate corrective action is what used to be called a disposition. Root
cause corrective action is what used to be called corrective action. Then
the FDA started using “corrective action” and “preventive action.” Corrective action is what used to be called a
disposition. Preventive action is what used to be called
corrective action.
If quality
professionals do not understand all these terms, how do we expect our Executives
to understand them? What would our Executives
think if their financial professionals changed the word profit to advantage,
or benefit, or value? That conversation would be silly and
non-value added. Why not go back to
basics and communicate with simple terms.
Terms that you could explain to a high school student. Terms that an interpreter could explain when
presenting to a non-English speaking audience.
What do you
think?
