Incident reporting is crucial to maintaining quality standards within any organization. It allows stakeholders to promptly identify, address, and rectify issues or nonconformance.
This article outlines the procedures for incident report entry, closure, reviews, and integrity checks within the Quality Nonconformance Control framework at DCL.
What type of issues are considered for corrective action?
When DCL is notified of an issue or nonconformance, we create a Corrective Action Required Customer, otherwise known as a CARC. Here are some examples of possible non-conformance:
A shipment of DCL arrives at the destination missing or with incorrect items.
An assembly job that was completed was built incorrectly.
You received a chargeback for a shipment to a distribution center.
CARC Documentation
The following steps will be taken when an issue is raised of any nonconformance.
1. Create an Incident Report
The first step in the CARC process is creating an incident report. Our team will need the following information to start this.
Please provide:
A concise summary addressing what happened.
Who the issue affected.
Where and when the issue occurred.
Relevant details such as the ship order number, part number, or transaction type.
These details are important to initiate the incident report review process.
2. Decide on the Best Resolution
The second step is to decide the best next action to correct the issue. We want to support your business so we'll ask what you'd like to do to fix the issue right away.
For example, if items are missing from a shipment, we may ask if a replacement shipment needs to be shipped. We may compare ship weight against actual weight and perform a cycle count of missing part numbers. We will check our quality check logs for evidence that quality checks were done. Last, visit the area where the shipment was processed and observe work area suitability and operator following best practices. If an assembly job was done incorrectly, do you want us to rebuild it? If you get a chargeback, we'll investigate if we followed the required process correctly.
3. Determine the Root Cause
After we've taken action to resolve the issue we also want to investigate the fundamental underlying reason or factor that contributed to the occurrence of a problem or nonconformance.
Identifying the root cause is essential in corrective action processes because it allows us to address issues and determine how to prevent the same problem from happening again.
4. Create Preventative Process
Once a root cause is determined, we will devise a process to prevent the same issue from happening again. For example, if a manufacturing defect is identified in a product, the root cause analysis might reveal that the defect resulted from a flaw in the production process rather than from a specific employee's error. In this case, implementing corrective actions to improve the production process, such as enhancing quality control measures or providing additional training to operators, would address the root cause and help prevent similar defects from occurring again.
What happens after a CARC is completed?
Your Account Manager will share the results of our investigation and our promotion process with our customer. If the customer is satisfied with the results, we will close out the CARC.
These procedures ensure systematic handling of incident reports, from entry to closure, and maintain the integrity of DCL’s quality nonconformance control framework. Regular reviews and integrity checks ensure continuous improvement and adherence to quality standards.