Managing Issues

Use the issue tracker to manage non-conformance issues, corrective actions, preventive actions, safety and other types of issues.
The Issue tracker comes with a set of pre-defined issue types:

• Audit Finding
• Customer Quality Issue or Complaint
• Design / Specification Issue
• Document Change
• Environmental Issue
• Improvement Request
• Maintenance Issue
• Product / Process Non-conformance
• Safety Issue
• Software Issue
• Supplier Quality Issue

When a non-conformance or other issue is identified, it is added to Quality systems Toolbox and described with the aid of images and/or files as necessary. Links to other content within Quality Systems Toolbox may also be included.
As the issue is processed, corrective actions are recorded as responses.

Reporting

Issues can be assigned to different categories for later reporting. For example, a supplier issue might be assigned to ‘late delivery’ or ‘incorrect parts supplied’. You can change the lists of categories for each type of issue to fit your specific requirements. Issues can also be organised into ‘folders’ or ‘tagged’ to group them in other ways for later reporting. For example, you may want to report on issues associated with a particular product, project, or location. There are many different Issue Tracker reports available from the ‘reports’ tab in the green toolbar.

Workflow

As the issue is dealt with, ‘responses’ are added to the issue to track the activity and form an audit trail of the corrective actions taken. From the front of the issue tracker, it is easy to see how many responses have been made for each issue.

Responses are assigned to different categories to describe the progress of the issue. As responses are added, the workflow state of the issue changes from ‘open and assigned’ through ‘in-progress’, and finally to ‘verified and closed’. The progress of the issue is shown visually, and the number of responses in each category.

Any logged in user may add a response, but only an action officer can change the workflow state of the issue.

Notifications

The issue is assigned to one or more ‘action officers’, who are responsible for resolving the issue. The action officer(s) and the user who added the issue will automatically be ‘subscribed’ to the issue and will receive email notifications when the issue is created and when responses are added. Any user may subscribe to the issue to stay informed of developments.

Search

Use the search options at the front of the Issue Tracker to quickly find the issue(s) you’re looking for. You can filter the list of issues by issue type, date, folder, workflow state, and action officer to get a short list of the issues you need. There are quick links to ‘my issues’, new issues, and issues you are subscribed to.

You can also search for specific text within the issue tracker to find the issue you are looking for, or use the global search at the top right of the site to search through all content in your site that matches the text you enter.
The user guide has more information on using search functions in QSToolbox, including how to perform wildcard searches for partial matches.

Links between Issues and other modules

Issues can link to any other content in Quality Systems Toolbox within the text describing the issue. There are also specific links to other content types for some of the issue types.
Assets: Maintenance Issues link to the asset stored in the Assets module. Assets with open issues will be flagged in the Assets register at the front of the assets module.*
Contacts: Customer complaints and Supplier issues in the Tracker link back to the relevant contact. If you view the contact, it’s easy to see what issues have been raised against them, and the status of those issues. Contacts with open issues will have a red flag next to their name in the front table of the Contacts module.
Documents: Document change requests link back to the document. Documents with an open Change Request Issue will be flagged in the front Documents table, and when you view the document itself, any open issues will be listed.