Record non-conformances

• Record the concern as it arises in manufacturing
• Attach traceability information e.g. product, defect, line, machine, nature of concern, detail, date, quantity affected and quantity received
• Attach documents e.g. photographs to aid with capturing the problem

Manage Corrective and Preventative Actions

• Assign ownership to manage the concern
• Notify various people / groups
• Workflow - manage the concern and change its status as it moves through the process
• Create a template-based action plan to handle the concern e.g. containment action, corrective action, preventative action
• Track the progress of the concern and the associated actions
• Track the age of each complaint and escalate with email alerts  

Investigate & resolve non-conformances

• Use the information in Shopfloor-Online MES to assist the investigation: batch numbers, lot numbers, serial numbers, production runs, production dates, shifts, manufacturing lines
• Investigate the root cause of the problem
• Build up a library of root causes 

Support continuous improvement

• Develop a history of concerns to support continuous improvement activities
• Analyse the concerns e.g. by product, defect, line, department, shift, crew and many others
• Monitor recurrences: have root causes been eliminated? Are they still causing problems? Was the preventative action successful?

• Job Tracking - to identify the production run or work order, production line or shift associated with the concern
• Quality - to access the results of all quality checks performed or missed on the production run
• Inventory Management - to manage traceability of lots of materials used in the process
• Build Traceability - to manage traceability down to serialised parts
• Labour - to determine who was running the manufacturing process at the time of the production
• Customer Complaints and Supplier Complaints modules which have an external focus