Non-Conformance Reports

A Non-Conformance Report (NCR) records a single instance of work, material or documentation that didn't meet requirements — a category (Material, Workmanship, Documentation, or Client complaint), a severity (Minor, Major, Critical), and a narrative that's built up as the investigation proceeds: root cause, correction action, and preventive action.

Recording that something went wrong is only half the job — the value is in the narrative that explains why it happened (root cause), what was done about this specific instance (correction), and what will stop it happening again (preventive action). Keeping all three as distinct fields on the same record, rather than one free-text "notes" field, makes it possible to tell at a glance whether an NCR has actually been investigated or just logged.

An NCR starts open, moves to in-progress while it's being worked, and closed once resolved, with a closure date and the person who verified the closure recorded on the record. The application derives whether an NCR's investigation is complete directly from its three narrative fields — root cause, correction action and preventive action all being present — rather than from a separate flag, so "investigated" always means those three fields are actually filled in, never a checkbox someone forgot to leave in sync with the real content.

The list page shows every NCR with its number, category, severity and status, filterable/sortable by date raised, severity, status, or when the record was created/updated. The detail page shows the full narrative; create and edit forms share the same fields.

• NCR number — required. This report's own identifying reference.
• Description — required. What the non-conformance is.
• Date raised — required.
• Raised by — required.
• Category — required. One of Material, Workmanship, Documentation, Client complaint.
• Severity — required. One of Minor, Major, Critical.
• Root cause — optional. Filled in once the investigation identifies why the non-conformance occurred.
• Correction action — optional. What was done to fix this specific instance.
• Preventive action — optional. What will prevent recurrence.
• Status — one of open, in-progress, closed.
• Closure date / Verified by — recorded once the NCR is closed.

Closing an NCR is a direct status edit — the application does not currently block closing an NCR whose root cause/correction/preventive action fields are still empty. Treat "investigation complete" (all three narrative fields present) as the standard to close against even though it isn't enforced as a hard rule yet.

There is no automatic link from an NCR back to the Inspection & Test Plan or other record that surfaced it, and no notification is triggered by any status change in the current version of the product — cross-reference related records by their own reference numbers in the Description field if useful.

What's the difference between an NCR and a Concession? An NCR records something that already happened and didn't meet requirements; a Concession is a request to accept a deviation — often raised because of an NCR, but the two registers aren't linked by a relational field today.