Trying to set up Corrective Action system using smartsheets

BrianS · 12/15/23

My company has been using smartsheets for order tracking and data reporting, but I'd like to try to use it for our corrective action system (we are AS9100). Currently we just use a controlled document to gather all of the data and put it in a folder that's manually created on sharepoint. I want to create a sheet to track all data on in order to build reports for myself and other management to review/report on.

I'm mostly interested in anyone willing to share templates or examples of what they've done. I can figure out setting up workflows, rules and formatting but instead of building this from scratch it seems a lot simpler to adopt what someone else has found to work for them.

My main concerns:

controlling access to edit cells to people the action is assigned to (we're still fairly new to smartsheets and I'm not sure if this is even possible)
adapting to customer/supplier corrective actions (this might just be controlled through external documents and manual input into this since we can't give out access to our smartsheets outside of the organization)
having an easy way to see data in one row without too much side scrolling (I've seen being able to generate reports that pull data from rows, is this as simple as setting up the report/form and viewing for any specifc row?)
any other issues you've solved for your company

If anyone has thoughts or solutions to these I'd appreciate any sharing of knowledge. Even if it's from an ISO9001, 13485, 16949 or similar type of system. Thanks!

SteyJ · 12/16/23

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/114468/trying-to-set-up-corrective-action-system-using-smartsheets

1.) Controlling access to edit cells can be done by creating a filter in the sheet for a contact column, then in the filter options select the contact list column, condition -> "Is one of" -> "Current User".

-- With these options selected, you can then set the default view of the sheet by clicking "Share", click the invite details arrow, and the option to change default view will appear.

-- You can further limit access by creating a Dynamic View (if you have the premium application) -- and limit access by current view, or by current user in a contact list column

2.) for customers, you may want to create a customer portal where a customer can update information into a sheet, then you can pull that data into your employers workspaces with INDEX/MATCH or other lookup functions.

3.) The best way to limit scrolling, is to have dedicated reports for specific items. You can have your primary sheet which handles a ton of information in one place, and then distribute that information into reports to quickly find data specific to any sub section.

Hope this helps!

sburbach · 10/16/24

@BrianS Did you ever come up with a solution on how to set up a corrective action plan? We are trying to do the same thing at our company. Right now everything is tracked with an excel document.

BrianS · 10/16/24

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/458492#Comment_458492

I did set something up but I'm not 100% happy with it. It's basically a spreadsheet where I have automations to toggle the status of each corrective action, format cells when not needed (like containment), and lock the row once the action has been closed out.

I had to create a separate workspace for it though because multiple people have admin authority on our collaborative workspace that I wouldn't want them to be able to enter anything in the approval and assignment columns. I locked columns to prevent any unintended changes to certain things.

One big problem I have now is our whole QMS is still new but we're also rapidly changing a lot of things, so we typically have multiple items to track for containment and corrective action. I had to make a separate grid to track individual items where everyone has open access to change dates and assignments and then I made a dashboard with reports that filter corrective actions that they own or they're on the team for. It's pretty clunky though.

Our production software is developing a corrective action module that we almost went to but there are a lot of employees that are not in our production software and I don't want to have all employees in our MES just for corrective actions.

What I set up will work and be better than manual management of individual documents, but Smartsheet just doesn't seem to have the functionality needed for this type of system.

I also have data shuttle set up to monitor our nonconforming material where I export a report from our production software into excel and then upload that manually as needed (at least daily), but this is also lacking due to the effort needed to update along with not being able to transfer information back into the production software. Our production software has functionality to do this but it's more work to set up so I'm just using Smartsheet for this until we can establish the more permanent solution.

I've also thought about having document control through Smartsheet but at this point I'm most likely going to purchase a SharePoint system to do document control, corrective actions, and internal audits. Smartsheet just doesn't have the ability to do what we really need and I've seen other discussions in this community asking for those features years ago.

If excel works for you right now then it will probably work in Smartsheet since it's easier to share and collaborate on Smartsheet, but my company is large enough that our customers would look at a Smartsheet system as being inadequate.

Trying to set up Corrective Action system using smartsheets

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Sincerely,

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