Failure to discover quality issues and product deviations can result in external non-conformance issues which come with regulatory risk, a loss of customer trust, and damage to your organization’s reputation. Furthermore, failure to manage quality issues and product deviations which are detected by the customer’s inspector or your customer itself can be embarrassing.
Sometimes it may happen that during activities on the shop floor or during an inspection visit, you can step into a specification deviation or a work that fails to meet quality standards. Usually, the issue is reported in a punch list or an NCR depending on the severity of the problem found and the document should be distributed to all interested parties.
Many people should be aware of the NCR or Punch List issued either through the supplier organization and within the customer team involved in the project. There will be several communications around the issue between vendor and customer; in addition, best practice is also to share info with the inspectors who are in charge of witnessing inspection activities. Everybody has to be kept updated because NCRs are used to determine the resolution with a customer and to document. any corrective changes made while Punch list items need to be closed to speed up activities in progress.
Obviously, you need to address risks and allow stakeholders to browse conformance notifications, reminders, and escalated issues related to quality issues. Info must be clear and well organized (including the who, what, why, when, where, and impact).
There must be evidence of who is responsible and his approval/resolution, badly written non-conformances are one thing, but ones written with non-explained jargon are just as bad.
An effective non-conformance management process is the foundation of every other component of the quality system. Once you have a good handle on occurrence tracking then things like metrics and Corrective Actions become much easier to define and manage and continuous improvement will be effective.
NCR and Punch list items under control
All companies large and small have to deal with managing non-conformances. The larger the company, the more complicated this process can become. Often for multi-site organizations, the process that works well at one location is not easily adopted at another location, and non-conformance is measured and managed in different ways.
In NotifyMe you can file NCR and punch list items by project with attachments and all the details, so as to make it easy to keep track of them and create statistics.
Here are a few reasons why NotifyMe is the perfect software to help you to manage NCRs and Punch list items through your organization and with your business partners (customers, vendors or inspection agencies):
- all the information is in a single place and shared with your project team so it is clear who has to do what and when.
- You have a “formal” environment on which you can manage NCR and Punch List, where counterparts can agree and sign off on action plan
- NotifyMe allows you to manage data visibility so as to share information only with people who need to be aware.
- Online access – Updates are available in real-time so that the green light to proceed with the manufacturing activities is given “live”.
- With NotifyMe API it is very easy to interface the software with your ERP.
With NotifyMe, organizations can streamline and master their conformance processes, avoiding delays and costs due to poor quality so as to deliver high-quality products and services.
