Corrective and Preventive Action Trends You Probably Aren’t Paying Attention To

Did you know that in an organization’s typical CAP system, more than half of all possible corrective actions are completed by less than 10% of the people who work on said actions? Many people have more actions to attend to than they can reasonably handle. In one case we observed, one person was responsible for completing over 280 actions at one time. 

With DevonWay’s Trending feature helping you analyze your data, you can create automated trend analyses with just a few seconds and a handful of clicks. Activities that used to take dedicated teams months of manual calculations are now at your fingertips. Traditionally, if you thought there might be an emerging trend, you probably spent more time identifying what the trend was than you did finding out the cause and doing something about it. To add further insult to injury, even in the best case scenarios there was a monthly report generated that summarized trends over time with common variables like Activity Codes or Event Codes. Now, you don’t have to wait that long – you can get trends for these variables and many others in an instant. 

Below are a couple of examples of how you can implement some best practices related to the use of DevonWay’s Trending feature. 

Example 1: Improve on completion time for Actions by monitoring trends in real time 

With Trending, you can quickly assess the workload of open actions by assignee. In the past, you could only get a snapshot of who had the most open actions and at best, maybe try to help the people who were lucky enough to fall at the top of the list. Since available workload varies widely by employee, a simple approach like this doesn’t help you find the people who really need assistance. Trending applies a much more sophisticated approach by calculating standard statistical process control metrics over time. That way, you can see who has had more actions assigned to them than normal.  

Example 2: Prevent problems before they happen by monitoring Observation and other trends 

Applying statistical trending techniques to CAP data has been a standard practice for CAP groups for years, but most groups haven’t had the time or resources to apply the same techniques to Observation and other data. On DevonWay’s platform, that problem doesn’t exist. Since trends can be applied against any type of structured data, the full power of statistical analysis is available to observations, work orders, assets, or any other data with an intrinsic time component. 

Ultimately, the above best practices should not only help mitigate operational risks, but create new opportunities to improve your organization. Statistical trends often act as the “first responders” of the operational world. A trend usually denotes a deeper root cause. Where there is smoke, there is fire. Recognizing trends faster using these best practices will allow your organization to capitalize on opportunities before your competitors do. Arguably opportunities they aren’t even paying attention to…

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