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The Chinese character for “crisis” means danger and opportunity. The coronavirus, aka Covid-19, outbreak has already wreaked havoc in the global economy, curtailed international and even domestic travel, and caused roughly 7,146 fatalities to date around the world.1 The reaction to this outbreak, as driven by corrective and preventive action (CAPA), may however save thousands of lives not only this year but in the future. It should also initiate serious thought as to the desirability of reshoring U.S. manufacturing capability that should have never been sent offshore in the first place, and generate new opportunities in distance networking technologies.
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The Automotive Industry Action Group’s Effective Problem Solving manual (CQI-20) defines an outstanding nine-step CAPA process that is applicable to almost any problem a manufacturer might encounter. These are essentially:
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Comments
Long term Containment versus Corrective action
I appreciate your article that relates this current condition to the Quality aspect of CAPA.
But I do not agree that a policy of long term containment is equivalent to Corrective action in the CAPA process.
While it may be true that maintaining the long term containment is the best that can currently be done, Accepting it as the corrective action (and finding the root cause) means that a true corrective action will no longer be pursued.
I have witnessed may companies that essentially end their CAPA doing exactly as you have suggested and when you ask WHY... it is typically that they are tracking a metric which measures the number of days that a CAPA remains open.
One has to question this metric as a KEY metric for any CAPA process if the process is being "shortcut" just to make sure the metric does not "look bad".
If we set a process to search for the root cause of problems, shouldn't working through the problem be the primary purpose?
Containment vs. CAPA
You are 100% correct that containment is not corrective action, at least not in a manufacturing setting. My understanding is that auditors will issue nonconformances for "CAPAs" whose corrective action is to sort out the nonconforming work, refund the customer's money, and so on without addressing the root cause, and rightly so. In this particular application, preventive action would indeed consist of a vaccine.
On the other hand, in the case of seasonal influenza, the "preventive action" is good for only a year because the virus mutates, and there are fears that COVID-19 can do so as well. The containment action will nonetheless prevent either from reaching epidemic proportions by reducing the effective transmission rate (the average number of people an infected person will infect) to less than 1. In this context, the containment actions of hand hygiene and social distancing could also be regarded as preventive controls that will work against new forms of coronavirus and also seasonal flu.
Containment, in the form of a national 2-week shutdown of almost everything (at the likely cost of 4% of 2020's gross domestic product) would probably correct the problem by destroying the virus totally. I read that flu and coronavirus have two weeks at most (the likely figure is 10 days or less) to find new hosts once they infect somebody. If they don't, they will be killed or inactivated by the host's immune system and never get a chance to propagate. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-17/coronavirus-emerg…
Risk and Opportunity
I am in total agreement with the vast majority of the points you make, I have one small area of disagreement. Until such time (and maybe not then) as a virtual meeting or conference occurs in an enviroment similar to the Star Trek holosuite, they will never be as effective or efficient as face to face interaction.
Consider, if you will, recent interactions you may have had, message exchange, email exchange, telephone, and face to face. Which were the fastest and most effective? Telephone was more effective than text, right? Voice cues add much context and meaning to the message. face to face adds visual cues, body language, again enriching the information flow. Then there is the rapid interchange of ideas, building one on the other.
Now, add more people... text rapidly degrades into multiple message trains, a tangle of email trails instead of a unified matrix. At least with voice, we retain the matrix but, as the group grows, it becomes difficult to "take the floor". There is also the matter of being aware of who is speaking. With long standing groups, this becomes easier but, with groups that ebb and flow in attendance, it is an issue.
In short, over the years, I have found that a face to face group can accomplish, in an hour or so, as much work, as much progress, as they could make in a day or so of messages and phone calls.
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