CARs

You say you document a lot of CARs, sometimes for small things. Perhaps your organization is confusing the development of corrections with the development of corrective actions. The development of actions to eliminate nonconformities, with the development of actions to eliminate the cause(s) of nonconformities.

Whenever a nonconformity occurs an organization must correct the situation:

The timer in the figure means that normally this must be done as quick as possible, to avoid unintended use.

What happens can be described as below:

An organization has a standard way of working and operates according to that standard. Then quality is check. If everything is OK the circle is closed and the organization decides to continue to use the standard. If a nonconformity is found the organization has to correct the situation and ask: Can we still trust in our standard or should we improve it? If the decision is: We need to improve the standard! The organization jumps from the cycle of control into the cycle of improvement:

A well-used CAR is only used when an organization decides that improvement is needed: An experiment has to be planned, performed and results check. If the results are positive, the decision is to make the change experimented become the new standard

So, a CAR should not be used automatically to treat a nonconformity. A CAR should only be used when an improvement is needed.