NULL
Empty 1
NULL
Empty 2

News

The USA Performance Improvement Core Peer Team has taken actions to embrace the INPO initiative to address cumulative impacts in the Corrective Action Program (CAP). Results of the short term actions to improve CAP effectiveness and efficiency include backlog reduction, behavioral changes and process changes are being noticed across the USA fleet.

CAP backlog reductions

One of the short term actions taken to improve CAP effectiveness and efficiency is the effort to reduce backlog of actions. Overall, the USA fleet plants have made vast improvements in reducing the number of corrective actions initiated and developed. “Prairie Island reduced their CAP backlog by 90 percent,” said Chip Calia, Prairie Island Business Planning Manager. “This allows us to focus on the more significant issues and to resolve them in a timely manner.”

CAP behavior changes

The significance of issues and their potential impact to the plant are understood and addressed using the most effective and efficient process. Screening assigns the more significant issues to the corrective action process for action and tracking. The screening process ensures that conditions that are NOT adverse to quality are assigned to a process outside of the Corrective Action Process. Hope Creek reduced the number of Root Cause Evaluations by half and Apparent Cause Evaluations by 20 percent.

CAP process changes

Changes to the screening process ensure that only conditions adverse to quality enter the corrective action program. Other approved processes, such as work management, will handle some issues identified through CAP. This allows managers flexibility in the type of investigation needed to understand, fix and monitor an issue. Performance monitoring activities that include integrated performance reviews, self-assessment, benchmarking, observation and use of performance indicators facilitate identification of problems before consequential self-revealing events occur.

“These efforts are resulting in positive impacts to the ownership and timely closure of issues through CAP,” said Calia. “This will help our leaders to concentrate their efforts on activities that are most important to safely operating our plants in the USA fleet.”