How to Optimize Your CAPAs

optimize_your_caps

Corrections and preventions are necessary to make sure that a business and its processes are running in the desired manner. The growth and sustainability of businesses are built on the robustness of their internal controls and processes. Facing unusually high sales returns with complaints of poor quality? Corrective and Preventive Actions (CAPAs) in such a case could be to ensure proper quality check before shipment of goods to customers. CAPAs are the necessary steps taken to ensure that business activities adhere to the laid out process flows. At other times, it could also be about re-engineering and optimizing your existing processes.

CAPAs are not necessarily damage-limitation mechanisms brought in to tackle fire-fighting situations. They prevent the recurrence of a present problem as well as eliminating probable problems. The optimal use of CAPAs calls for foresight, continual improvement, process understanding, and regular assessment of activities. And it is through optimal use of CAPA that long-term health of your business is secured.

From People Dependency to Process Dependency

People are integral to carry out the operations in any business, be it manufacturing or service. When the processes are laid out, the involvement of manual effort, skill, and judgment must be identified. Optimal CAPAs put checks in place to make sure that the process is not highly dependent on human intervention. This helps your business to be dependent on the process rather than human skill and discretion. By doing so, CAPAs eliminate human errors, resource under-utilization, process delays, and quality deficiencies.

CAPAs ensure that the staff identifies anomalies in the process and escalate them promptly. For someone processing payment against a vendor invoice, a system-generated red flag while processing a duplicate invoice is one such CAPA. CAPAs can be built into the system so that a duplicate payment, as in this case, is not erroneously processed. Pulse ensures the installation of such safety measures by building checklists and identifying action points within the business ecosystem.

Mapping the Process to Eliminate Future Problems

The business owner needs to use CAPAs to draw insights from processes and activities. Integration of CAPA involves the end-to-end mapping of the processes. This streamlines the workflow and identifies loopholes that would otherwise remain undetected. By not applying CAPAs optimally, you are only inviting problems to appear in these loopholes. This is exactly what Pulse’s tailor-made safety audit checklists do. They collect data and inspect the loopholes continuously. Actions can be taken on the identified problems on a real-time basis.

You have to make sure that CAPAs map your business activities and you are in a better position to gauge your timelines. You will estimate the process cycles more accurately and quote a more realistic delivery date to your client. In the absence of this, your timeline estimate would be an intelligent guess, at best.

Clearer Sight of the Future

As mentioned already, CAPAs are not meant merely to address the trouble your business is in. If you are facing a lot of sales returns for a particular product, addressing it would be a corrective action. However, how good is your preparedness when you are shipping a new product to a customer for the first time? Ensuring indisputable quality for a first time product would require a robust preventive measure on your part.

CAPAs should be used to sensitize employees on the need to highlight process anomalies promptly. And a long-term and intelligent use of CAPAs should be applied to breed an environment of process compliance and adherence in the organization.

Continual Assessment

The effectiveness of your CAPAs should be assessed continuously and over the long run. Implementing stop-gap measures will not help you achieve your CAPAs optimally. While taking a CAPA, you have to keep its shelf life in mind. And to ensure their long-term effectiveness, you have to regularly evaluate them.

Besides, your assessment should also include the cost and effort involved in the CAPA, and the improvement generated out of its life cycle. The Pulse safety audit application makes this assessment automatically. It gives you a holistic view of your employee activities, generates reports and analytics, and follows up on the resolution of issues. This makes it easy for you to make optimal use of CAPAs and streamline the business operations more effectively. What’s more is that it stores all this data on cloud storage so that you can access it from anywhere at any time. 

Conclusion

Effective CAPAs help run an organization smoothly. They help in sticking to the processes laid out. Pulse is an easy to use and an optimized platform that aids companies to keep their data organized, clear, and tailored to their needs.