Too often, when adverse events enter an organization's Quality System, people are quick to open up a Corrective Action or Preventive Action (CAPA).  No matter what the adverse event, its severity or impact, a CAPA is opened up.  Having a CAPA system in place is an extremely valuable (and essential) part of a good Quality Management System.  However, if everything becomes a CAPA, then you create a bottleneck.  Employees are so focused on working on their CAPAs, they forgot to do anything else.  Essentially, people "freak out" like the sky were falling and open a CAPA.

What you end up with is this - hundreds of CAPAs, with no real identification in which CAPAs are critical to the business and which have less impact.  It becomes the needle in the haystack conundrum - finding the critical adverse events can prove difficult if you don't have a way of finding them.  I once asked a Quality Manager how he handles CAPAs - what his metric was.  "We handle the most overdue first," was his reply, and he went on to say that if it is critical and is a the "bottom of the pile", then they don't get to it in time.  I say, there is a better way. Click here to read blog and download free whitepaper