As per standard definition as per ISO9001 (Quality Management System Standard) of preventive action is:

"Action to eliminate the cause of a potential nonconformity or other undesirable potential situation".

Preventive actions are of a proactive nature. They do not wait for nonconformance to occur.

Preventive action is an important component of quality management in an organization having different interpretations on different situation, these include following elements:

• Signaling the imminence or probability of an event or crisis - alerting, informing, giving early warning;
• Preparing (oneself), anticipating possible events, undergoing training, being ready to act;
• Preventing violations of statutory & regulatory law (forestalling harmful acts, excesses or the repetition of violations).

So, prevention, whether of defect, disasters, etc., always implies long-term action. This has two main components:

• acting on systems and on vulnerability, so as to reduce the risk, probability or potential destructiveness of an attack or disruptive event;
• Influencing those who are or could be involved in offence / ignore the normal duties with a view to informing them, training them and changing their behavior.

In view of above, for successful implementation of this "Preventive action process" component of QMS, it is required to include a preventive dimension in all the activities of organization. This should be reflected in its structure and internal organization, for instance:

• the active role assigned to every level of employee in analyzing situations, anticipating crises, providing extensive training and information on risk & vulnerability to improve their emergency preparedness;

• The major efforts undertaken to develop policy on risk and vulnerability and normal preventive action on different functionalities and promote its implementation.
• the teaching of prevention methodology in a wide range of contexts

The important role, which underpin a key area of the organization's work to prevent the problem. Key responsible person holds protection workshops with representatives of different party in order to share its ideas with others, thereby contributing to an enhanced global perception of protection, of which preventive action is a part;

• the pioneering role of organization management in developing a comprehensive approach to all risk & vulnerability management, giving priority to prevention framework, protection of entire infrastructure, environment and rehabilitation.

Along the organization wide movement, all above actions must link to business objective of the outfit and any potential risk or nonconformities must be understood in term of impectness on business image of the organization. All should know this notion that "It is very easy to recover from when we loose money but it is very tough to recover when we loose business image before outside of the world". So, this business linked adhered movement, will give extra strength on the entire process of this action and organization will have extra care to define serious and systematic process to address the cause of potential problem. As ISO 9001:2000 suggest us, at least, following points must be covered when we go for addressing issue of potential problem:

• Determining potential nonconformities and their causes,
• Evaluating the need for action to prevent occurrence of nonconformities,
• Determining and ensuring implementation of preventive action needed,
• Records of results of action taken,
• Reviewing preventive action taken, and
• Analysis of data.