Today’s template is one I created for use in reporting Corrective and Preventive Action (CAPA) status (opened, closed, backlog) by manager. If you’re in a hurry, you can click on the image to the left to request this Quality Resource, now.
The availability of sophisticated, enterprise-level, CAPA tracking and performance reporting systems is great … if you can afford them … and if you can afford to maintain them. Unfortunately, that appears to be getting more difficult to do and, in my experience, has not often been the case. A poorly maintained system can be (and often has been) worse than no system at all.
What to do? Well, start small and work with tools that are familiar and easily accessible to everybody… like MS Excel. Get the biggest bang you can for your buck.
I have found that heightening personal accountability for timely completion of assigned corrective or preventive actions, by publishing the status of CAPA’s assigned to each person in an organization, can result in some pretty impressive returns on investment.
For a small to medium sized company, this isn’t too hard to do using an MS Excel spreadsheet, such as the one provided here. You can customize the reporting frequency interval to work best for you, but tracking by month has been a pretty effective way for most companies I’ve worked with to go. If you’ve got a relatively high volume of CAPA activity, try weekly status updates. If you hardly ever need to improve anything (because you’re just THAT good), go with a quarterly report. You might even be able to get away with generating only a twice yearly or annual report for use in your Management Reviews.
If identifying people by name or title on a performance chart seems as though it may not be suitable for your organization, try using department names or product names, instead.
For each reporting interval, the template provided will empower you to graphically display the level of CAPA’s initiated to, closed by or in the backlog for each assigned person or group.
There are as many ways to do this as there are people wanting to do it, of course. You may prefer to switch to a classic Six Sigma Dashboard style and, if that’s the case, Dashboard Spy has a nifty example for you (click here). If you’d like the software to do what you see on Dashboard Spy using Excel, consider QI Macros, one of my favorite salt-of-the-earth applications. I’ve created a template for a Simple Quality Dashboard using QI Macros. The Simple Quality Dashboard template is always available for download on the CAPAtrak Website and I’ve seen it in use in many companies I’ve visited.
If this particular “Simple CAPA Status by Manager Template” doesn’t seem to work well for your specific needs, try using Google to do a search for others. I got 25 MS Excel spreadsheet hits when I entered this search string: “capa status dashboard filetype: xls“.
As always, if you need a particular form or advice on any other quality-related matter, feel free to contact me. I’ll be happy to do what I can to help.
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