Original Date: 10/14/1988
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

The Material Review Board (MRB) documents the "instant" problem and gathers quality data. The corrective action process analyses the quality data and determines causes, trends and long term solutions.

Both the Material Review Chief and Corrective Action Chief report to the Manager of Product Assurance Engineering and have separate organizations to carry out their functions.

The material review process starts with an inspection report (rejection notice) provided by one of approximately 400 inspectors. The rejection is reviewed and entered into the Quality Management System (QMS) database. The rejected material is reviewed to determine its disposition. It may be used as is, scrapped, reworked, repaid or returned to the vendor.

The purpose of the corrective action process is to prevent or reduce the rate or recurrence of a defect, discrepancy, failure, or other condition judged significantly detrimental to safety, cost, quality, or performance of the product by correcting the root cause. The process is initiated by management request, document review, QMS thresholds, or analysis reports. Problems are investigated to determine the root cause and appropriate corrective action.

Problems that cannot be resolved at a lower level are resolved by Corrective Action Committees. These committees are composed of mid-level management personnel that address problems that cross departmental lines, problems unresolved by departmental corrective action activities, root causes of repetitive problems, high dollar and high frequency problems. Follow-up is assigned to ensure corrective action is effective.

For more information see the Point of Contact for this survey.