Non-Conformance.

1st March 2017

Non-Conformance.

Sounds very serious, doesn’t it? and perhaps a bit off putting as a consequence.

And that’s a shame because a good non-conformance management process is the beating heart of any structured management system, and is a hugely useful business improvement tool. If you only adopt one of the key management processes you should adopt this one.

What is a non-conformance? Well there are a number of definitions in the various management system standards such as ISO 9001, but simply put a non-conformance occurs when something goes wrong, or deviates from a plan. So the whole thing really is a structured process whereby you can understand where your daily business process is falling down. Traditionally the non-conformance process can have quite a narrow field of vision but there are ways in which it can be adapted to give you essential feedback about all aspects of your businesses performance. Really enlightened organisations actually merge their non-conformance process with their staff suggestion process which removes the rather negative connotations of the traditional non-conformance process and creates one great feedback process.

When a non-conformance is raised (and really anyone in your organisation should be able to raise one) then at the very least two things happen, firstly someone decides what action to take there and then to address the issue (known as corrective action), and secondly someone decides what action to take in order to stop the same thing happening again (known as preventative action). These two simple activities hide a great deal of potential for significantly improving your businesses efficiency, the “continuous improvement” often spoke about when people talk about management systems.

But there’s much more you can do with the non-conformances and the very valuable data they contain.

If you recall in an earlier blog we spoke about setting business goals, and then we analysed these goals to determine which of your business processes were linked to which goal. So if you were to link each non-conformance raised with a process then you can link non-conformances to business goals, and suddenly you now know which business goal will be improved if you address specific non-conformances. Given limited resources one assumes you would rather address issues linked to a significant business goal rather than issues linked to a process with little or no impact on business goals? It’s a great tool for generating business investment cases, as it links potential expenditure (on preventative action) with improved business efficiency. So should an auditor come calling you can reasonably demonstrate why some non-conformances are being addressed in preference to others – providers of safety critical services of course can use this process to target those issues with a greater impact on safety. It brings us back to our mantra of “management by data, not by anecdote.

As you build up a non-conformance data base (or use a spread sheet or a paper based approach) you will soon be able to get an overview of the types of non-conformance being raised and then be able to analyse this information to identify rouge processes or departments (or individuals), and remember, if they are all linked to your business goals and individual processes then you will soon get to see where your management attention is required.

The key message here is don’t think that you need to have a fully-fledged management system to benefit from a non-conformance process, want to know more about how this feedback process can work for you? then please get in touch for a chat.