Living with Corrections

Have you ever wondered why certain failure events (such as complaints from customers or even mistakes made by someone) keeps appearing even after the problem has been solved? Due to such repeated events, there are also organizations out there that hire staff to handle them....These kind of situations will create what we call as the Hidden Cost of Poor Quality, which are most of the time is absorbed as operation cost or the cost of doing business...... It's a known fact that Revenue - Cost = Profit, but one should realize that the cost is certainly not the real cost of doing business because it includes the failure costs as well......

The main reason for the failure events to recur is because no one actually takes the right Corrective Action (CA)....The CA taken may not be adequate or another common scenario is that the problem is considered solved by merely taking Correction but not CA......Since I'm involved in training and consultation of the ISO 9001 certification process, I tend to come accross such audit reports where only corrections are done but not the required CA. If this current trend continuous then there will be no chance for us to see any sort of Preventive Action (PA).....These kind of problem occurs mainly due to the poor understanding of the issue by the decision makers (top management).....They just can't differenciate between Correction, CA and PA.....Many organization that I've been to have tons of data which they merely compile and present for the many required reports, that's all.....There is no further statistical analysis done to understand the trend or any kind of hidden information that can be very vital for better decision making.......