Action Items

Action Items are corrective or preventive actions (CAPA) assigned in response to a finding or to a root cause analysis. They live independently of whatever they came from — so they remain active and trackable even after the audit is completed or the analysis is closed.

Action items are worked from two views, depending on your role:

• My Actions — the personal worklist for the person responsible for completing an action
• Action Workbench — the manager’s cross-audit view for oversight, comments, and effectiveness review

Creating an Action Item

Action items are created from within a Finding while the parent audit is In Progress:

1. Open the finding
2. Navigate to the Action Items tab
3. Choose Create Action Item
4. Fill in:
   • Title — what needs to be done
   • Description — detailed explanation of the required action
   • Action Type — what kind of action this is (see below), required
   • Responsible Person — who is accountable for completing this action
   • Due Date — deadline for completion
   • Priority — urgency level (configured in Master Data)

Action Type: Correction vs. Corrective Action

ISO 9001:2015 requires distinguishing between two different kinds of response to a finding, so every action item must be classified with one of the following types:

Action Type	Meaning
Correction	Immediate remediation of the nonconformity itself — for example, reworking a defective part or re-issuing an incorrect document. This fixes the symptom, not necessarily the underlying cause.
Corrective Action	Eliminates the root cause of the nonconformity so it does not happen again — for example, retraining staff or changing a faulty process step.
Preventive Action	Addresses a potential nonconformity that has not yet occurred, based on a risk identified during the audit.

Choosing the right type matters for reporting: it lets you see whether a finding was only patched (Correction) or whether its cause was actually addressed (Corrective Action) — a core requirement of ISO 9001:2015, clause 10.2.1.

Where action items come from

Two sources feed the same worklists:

• From a finding — the classic path, described below
• From a root cause analysis — a 5-Why analysis creates general action items, an 8D analysis creates one per discipline: the immediate containment action (D3), the corrective actions (D5/D6) and the preventive action (D7)

Action items from a root cause analysis behave exactly like those from a finding. The only visible difference is that the Finding column stays empty when the analysis had no finding behind it — a customer complaint, for example, that never went through an audit.

Action Item Lifecycle

Action items follow a structured lifecycle with explicit status transitions:

Status	Meaning
Open	Assigned but not yet started
In Progress	Work has begun
Verified	Work completed and submitted for review
Effective	Effectiveness has been confirmed (optional step)
Closed	Verified, accepted, and closed by the responsible person or manager
Cancelled	Action item was withdrawn

The responsible person drives the first steps in My Actions; the remaining steps (marking effective, closing, cancelling) are typically handled in the Action Workbench.

Change History

All changes to action items — status transitions, field edits, attachment uploads — are tracked automatically and visible in the Change History section.

Next Steps

• My Actions — the personal worklist
• Action Workbench — the manager’s oversight view