Corrective and Preventive ActionCAPA

CAPA separates corrective action — eliminate the cause of a detected nonconformity — from preventive action — eliminate the cause of a potential nonconformity before it occurs. ISO 9001:2015 places CAPA across clause 10.2 (nonconformity and corrective action) and clause 10.3 (continual improvement), and the same logic appears in ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 because all three share the Annex SL structure. The corrective half closes the finding; the preventive half stops the same root cause from producing a different finding later.

The failure mode of a CAPA system is closure without cause. A corrective action that closes a nonconformity by retraining the worker, without addressing the process or the design that let the worker make the error, guarantees the nonconformity returns. A CAPA tied to a root cause analysis — and to a verification that the action actually broke the cause chain — is the one that prevents recurrence. The measure of a CAPA program is not the count of actions closed but the count of nonconformities that did not come back. See NCR, root cause analysis, and Five Whys.