8.5 Improvement
Continual Improvement
You should strive to continually improve your quality system through the use of your quality policy, objectives, audits, analysis of data, corrective and preventive actions and management review.
Corrective Action
This means: eliminate the cause of problems. A documented procedure needs to be written covering:
reviewing of these issues determining the causes of problems evaluation of the need for action implementing actions required to fix them recording all the above finally how a review takes place of all preceding actions Preventive Action
You need to document how you will eliminate a potential problem. What this means is that when you plan a new product or service, you need to think about what could go wrong and "mistake proof" it, so that it won't happen. These shall be appropriate to the effects of the potential problems. A documented procedure shall be established to define requirements for:
how do you go about finding potential problems and their causes evaluating the need for action implementing actions needed to fix them records of all the above as above: finally how a review takes place of all preceding actions Corrective action remains the same, but the use of preventive actions has changed to a documented procedure looking to periodically address preventive (improvement) actions. This affirms the theme of continual (normally evolutionary, sometimes revolutionary) improvement within this new standard which we fully support. But these actions are not to be taken lightly. If you would like further advice,
We have recently written about Continual Improvement in two newsletters
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