CAPA

Corrective action addresses the problem that happened; preventive action addresses the problem that has not happened yet but plausibly could. The pairing forces a quality system to move from firefighting to root cause, which is the whole point.

The classic failure mode is the CAPA that closes with retraining as the root cause fix. Inspectors read CAPA logs the way auditors read audit trails: a system whose corrective actions never touch process or technology is describing its problems, not correcting them.