It is hard to comprehend why many are so engrossed with NCR when it comes to ISO Quality Management System (QMS). What is wrong with receiving Non-conformance Request (NCR) or Preventive & Corrective Action Request (PCAR/CAR)?

What is with this obsession? Are you going to hell or going to be put on a guillotine and have your head chopped? I am an accredited internal auditor for ISO and i am puzzled with those pale faces when it comes to NCR or PCAR.

Let me explain to you why NCR or PCAR must occur within the organization. I know my management and construction subjects and i am going to advice you about receiving NCR.

Top management especially in construction should not put more than 5% of their effort in their processes on documentation to prevent NCR and to ensure compliance. Why a mere 5%? If you do a Pareto analysis on failure of a construction company or processes, you will find out that 80% of the problems are caused by time and cost. Will one NCR caused such disaster? No, one NCR will not affect or reflect heavily on this. It is due to mismanagement and too much emphasize on paperwork which leads to overrun of cost or worst, lost and expense.

In construction, we are dealing with human and highly unique processes where defects or non-compliance will be set at a very comfortable sigma value, say 1.64 which represents 5% defects. Why it should be around 1.64 when it comes to construction? I am picking a reasonable margin which is similar to concrete target mean strength which allows 5% of its population to be defective. Assuming that this sigma value is a little to low, let us put the target as high as 2.33 which allows 1% of NCR for every process, it is still achievable.

What is wrong with an average single NCR for each month over the period of a year or 12 NCRs in a single audit? I don't see it as a big issue. Why? 1 NCR over 50,000 man-hour a month is actually 0.00002 or 0.002% or 2000 DPMO. The achieved sigma value for this rate is more than sigma 5 (>233 DPMO when we only achieved >20 DPMO).

Let say this NCR losses 100 man-hours to rectify, the value is around 0.002 or 0.2% and achieved sigma 2.9. Is there anything wrong with time lost? I don't see a big loss here rather than having 50% of the top management putting 70% effort in doing paperwork which incurred losses about. Time loss for this is quite staggering, assuming 40 managerial staffs doing paperwork. The total lost would be equivalent to (20 staffs out of 40 x 70% effort x 8 hours x 25 working days a month) 2,800 man-hour lost per month. That is 28.8 times more man-hours gone doing paperwork. Not to say amount paid for their high salaries or wages.

You don't need to have a black belt in six sigma or be a Keynesian economist or what so ever to understand the economic loss when practicing bureaucracy when implementing the ISO QMS.

Try to read more on modern Japanese operation management on how they target efficiency; not the classical shit of the 60s brought by Ford and scientific management from the previous industrial revolution. We are ushering into the next industrial revolution for F* sake.