CAPA is the process a quality system uses to remove the causes of problems. A corrective action deals with a problem that has already happened: you find the root cause and change something so it does not happen again. A preventive action deals with a problem that has not happened yet but could, such as a risk spotted in a trend or an audit. A CAPA record usually holds the problem statement, containment, root cause, actions, owners, due dates and a check that the actions worked.
Example: Three NCRs in a month show burrs on the same bracket. The CAPA traces them to a deburring step missing from the work instruction, adds the step and a check, trains the cell, then reviews the next 60 days of NCRs to confirm the burrs stopped.
Without CAPA, the same defects get sorted, reworked and written up over and over. Auditors look hard at CAPA records, especially at whether the root cause is real and whether anyone checked that the fix worked.
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