Give each action one row with four things: one owner, a calendar date, a status and a pointer to the evidence. A date the auditor cannot check is not a date, so use days and deliverables, not “Q1” or “ongoing”. Review the tracker every week until the follow up audit, and send the response early.
Monday afternoon, a spreadsheet open on the shared drive. The finding now has a number, CAR-0417, and four actions with owners. A response is a promise. The tracker is where the promise gets checked every week until the follow up audit.
Each action gets one row, and each row needs four things: one owner, a calendar date, a status and a pointer to the evidence. A date the auditor cannot check is not a date.
Set dates the auditor can check
Counted from the closing meeting, which is day 0, the case runs like this:
- Day 0: containers removed and tagged. Day 1: all stations and the shelf checked.
- Day 5: peel test results back.
- Day 7: first weekly sweep, and the stockroom lead is named owner.
- Day 10: new labels in use. Day 14: receiving procedure revised.
- Day 28: response sent, 2 days before the due date of day 30.
Every date is a day, an owner and a deliverable that exists or does not. "Q1", "ongoing" and "in progress" are not dates. A tracker where every status says in progress is a plan, and an auditor reading it will see that.
Review it weekly
Look at the tracker on the same day every week. Anything due in the next three days gets chased. Anything late gets a new date with a reason, not a quiet edit. The owner is a person, not a department. If a department owns it, nobody does.
If the customer wants the response in 8D form, fill the form from the tracker. The same facts go into both, so they cannot disagree.
Read more: how to write an 8D report, the free 8D report checker and NCR vs CAR. In the free audit finding response builder this is the Owner and due date section, and it flags a missing date.
The mistake to avoid
Setting a date and then not looking at it until the week it is due.
- Open your corrective action log.
- Find every item with no date or no owner.
- Fix them this week.
Open the printable Monday Board
Related on ShopFloorOps
The plant, the audit, the finding and every number in this book (finding CAR-0417) are a made-up example. The tool sidebars show ShopFloorOps tools, which I make and sell. Every chapter teaches the step itself, so you can use your own forms. New to a term? See the quality glossary.