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PUBLISHED
January 16, 2023
READ TIME
7 Minutes
WRITTEN BY
Dina Adlouni
Dina is the resident Content Writer at EcoOnline North America . When she’s not writing about health and safety, you’ll find her enjoying a cup of tea while watching her favorite sitcom.
Corrective and preventive actions can help you protect your people and create a safer work environment. A corrective action is one which is meant to rectify a deficiency or nonconformance in your safety program so it does not recur, while a preventive action is one which is taken to prevent a nonconformance from ever happening.
Having corrective and preventive action (CAPA) management software can help you spot, mitigate, and even prevent certain deficiencies in your safety program so you can effectively create a safer workplace. Over time, this will help you create a stronger safety program to meet your safety goals.
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CAPA management software is a digital solution which can help you keep track of all corrective and preventive actions to effectively mitigate hazards. Maintain a record of all actions taken as well as nonconformances identified and simplify the execution process through automated alerts or notifications to key stakeholders.
With everything in one digital solution, you can also begin to track trends and patterns to help you spot key areas of concern and their root causes. Effectively execute all actions through CAPA management software to reduce incidents and injuries on site and maintain compliance with industry regulations.
CAPA management software is vital in every organization as it can help you standardize CAPA processes across different teams and sites. When all teams are aware of the protocols which must be followed, this will help establish a sense of consistency across the organization.
CAPA management software can also help streamline these processes from start to finish. Identify the root cause behind certain deficiencies and nonconformances, assign a corrective or preventive action to key stakeholders, alert them through the software through an automated notification, and follow up on corrective or preventive action completion status. This also creates a sense of accountability among the workforce, as they are responsible for completing this task to help mitigate a hazard. Over time, this will help to strengthen your safety culture as safety is everyone’s responsibility.
Track patterns and trends in safety data collected through CAPA management software to mitigate hazards and reduce incidents more effectively. With all deficiencies and actions documented within one centralized system, you can begin to analyze information collected to identify top hazards more efficiently. This will help you more efficiently protect your people and stay proactive to prevent incidents from occurring.
With a proper system in place to help manage CAPA processes, you can start to experience several benefits, including:
As all corrective and preventive action processes are now streamlined and documented through CAPA management software, you can more effectively get to the root cause of nonconformances on site. This is done through greater visibility with the help of the data collected over time. CAPA management software reporting capabilities can help you uncover any patterns which may appear. This will help you get a better idea of what the most common risks on site are and allow you to develop a plan to make sure all key stakeholders know what to do to properly mitigate them. It will also help you stay proactive to prevent any similar hazards from arising.
To find out more about root cause analysis, its core principles, as well as tools and methods for implementation, check out our blog: Root Cause Analysis [Principles, Steps & Tools].
With greater root cause analysis, CAPA management software can help you see fewer incidents on site. Now that you know what the top hazards are at your organization and you’ve gained greater visibility into what the front-line workers are experiencing, you can work towards effectively eliminating or reducing hazards and risks. This will help you see fewer incidents and help reduce the severity of incidents which may occur.
Fewer incidents and injuries on site can help you increase employee retention and attract more people to your organization. A strong safety record can also help you win bids/tenders, generating more ROI for your business.
Having such processes in place can also strengthen your safety culture. With proper CAPA processes in place, people can be held accountable for their actions. CAPA management software can make this easy as you can simply set up alerts or notifications to key stakeholders to complete a specific corrective action, once a deficiency is identified. You can also check on the status of completion of these actions, holding those employees accountable.
This also helps to standardize communication across your organization’s locations to deliver the proper insights to key stakeholders in real time. This will ultimately strengthen your safety culture as employees understand that safety is everyone’s responsibility.
To find out some other ways to empower your workforce, check out our whitepaper: 5 Steps to a Strong Culture.
The CAPA management software you choose must have certain functionalities in order to truly help you protect your people. Such features include, but are not limited to:
CAPA software can help you simplify your hazard identification and management process. Log your hazards and risks, and easily automate the process through alerts and corrective action notification. Quickly alert key stakeholders of corrective or preventive actions that need to be completed and follow up on their completion status, as mentioned above to mitigate hazards faster.
When digitizing your CAPA management process, consider software that provides conditional logic with inspection forms or checklists. This capability can automate corrective actions when employees answer and complete inspections, so any deficiencies are actioned immediately.
Conduct investigations and effective root cause analysis to help implement corrective as well as preventive measures to protect your people. Alert key members of root cause analysis implementation to get to the source of nonconformances at your organization. As you accumulate more and more data, you can begin to track and trend patterns to aid in your root cause analysis process.
Once the root cause analysis process has been conducted, you can easily determine what changes need to be implemented. Software makes it easy to create site-specific change management processes (checklists) to define any changes needed and identify risk areas. Create management of change forms to evaluate the impact related to changes such as legislative requirements, affected personnel and/or operating procedures. Give your employees the ability to review and approve execution plans and effectively communicate all required site changes to all affected employees digitally, to orchestrate this change effectively.
Having one place to manage all health and safety records also makes it simpler to demonstrate compliance. Maintain an audit trail and prove that you have corrected all deficiencies found in the field or on site with the help of CAPA management software. This is beneficial to show as evidence to any inspectors who may be visiting to prove that you have done your due diligence.
CAPA management software should grant you reporting and analytics capabilities to gain greater insight into deficiencies found in your safety program. This can help you keep a record of all CAPA reports to track trends and patterns more efficiently and more effectively conduct your root cause analysis procedures.
A mobile option can help you boost productivity and efficiency. With the ability to easily take and annotate photos of hazards that are seen on site and conduct ad hoc inspections, employees can alert key stakeholders of the corrective actions needed. This can help empower your workforce as they can conduct inspections anywhere at anytime, literally placing safety in their hands.
Our EHS management solution can help you do all the above and more! Easily conduct hazard inspections with a mobile app, automate corrective actions and instantly alert key stakeholders of any corrective actions needed. Keep track of their completion status and maintain a record of all corrective actions, steps taken to complete them, and which employees were involved in the process. This will help create a greater sense of accountability with your teams.
But that’s not all! Deliver advanced analytics and reporting to key stakeholders to understand the strengths and weaknesses found within your CAPA processes. With greater visibility, you can pinpoint areas of weaknesses which you can work to strengthen.
Check out how Richcraft Homes, a construction company, has been able to increase their corrective actions completed by 400% and reduce their two-week long hazard identification process by 85% in this case study.
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