The findings that never became NCRs.
Your non-conformance process is well defined, and it should be heavy — containment, segregation, disposition, and a schedule hit somebody has to explain. Which is exactly why the condition your inspector noticed on nights, the one that was not quite a non-conformance yet, gets fixed and forgotten on the spot.
An NCR is a threshold. Underneath it, there is no container.
Above the line, aerospace is the best-documented manufacturing on earth. Part number, revision, configuration baseline, heat lot, router, disposition, signature. Below the line — the setup that needed a second look, the fixture that has been walking, the operation that keeps coming back and passing on the retry — there is no record at all.
Not because anyone is hiding anything. Your house already accepts a tier below the NCR: that is what a yellow tag is. But a yellow tag holds material. Nothing in the building holds a condition.
NCR raised · contained and segregated · MRB · disposition · closedDocumented, auditable, already working. Fieldmark does not go here.
“Is this worth writing up?”Asked twenty times a week, on the floor, against a schedule.
Noticed · mentioned at shift change · corrected in the moment · gone by MondayThe largest source of signal in the house, and the only one with nowhere to go.
Every number you report is derived from something that already went wrong.
First pass yield. DPMO. Scrap and rework rate. Supplier quality index. Audit findings and CAPA. Five metrics, and not one of them can move until something has already been scrapped, reworked, rejected or written up. None of it can show you a condition that has not cost you anything yet.
The same condition returns, and the first four times are not written anywhere.
→ You pay to solve it once through root-cause work, having already paid for it four times as rework.
A customer auditor asks how you knew a trend was forming.
→ You knew. Three people knew. None of it is in a system, so the answer is a story.
Chronic recurrence and a one-time event look identical in the record.
→ Both appear once, because only the occurrence that crossed the threshold was ever captured.
Pull your last five escapes. How many were the first time anyone in the building had seen that condition?
Layered process audits cover a different axis. Keep them.
An LPA is scheduled, checklist-bound, and walked by successive layers of management against controls you have already identified as critical. It is good at confirming that a known control is holding, it is the right tool for that, and nothing here replaces it.
But an LPA can only ask the questions already on the sheet. The condition nobody wrote a line item for is invisible to it by construction — and a plant can run high LPA completion and still miss the process controls that actually drive escapes. Completion is not the same as impact.
This is the other axis: unprompted notice, by the person standing at the machine, of something no one put on a checklist. The two are complementary, and the LPA gets better when the checklist is informed by what the floor has actually been seeing all quarter.
One is a note. Eleven on the same operation in six weeks is a decision.
None of those eleven would have earned an NCR on its own, and none of them should have — that is the whole point. A photograph and one line costs fifteen seconds and nobody's MRB. The eleventh is what turns a one-time event into chronic recurrence on a screen, while it is still rework and has not yet left the building.
A record with nothing after it is worse than no record.
This is the objection a quality director raises first, and it is correct. A house full of logged observations that were never dispositioned is not an asset — during a Nadcap audit an open self-identified item is a finding, and in any later inquiry a documented condition with no action turns “we did not know” into something much worse.
So the capture is not the product. The closure is. When an observation raises a flag, that flag ends in exactly one of three ways, and the system's job is to make sure none of them sit in none of them:
An owner, a date, and the evidence that it was corrected — attached to the original photograph rather than filed in a separate log.
The observation becomes the opening evidence for the process you already run. A feeder into MRB, never a substitute for it, and never a judgement Fieldmark makes on your behalf.
The reason is required, it carries a name, and it is shown back on the capturer's own observation. “Looked at, judged not significant” is a defensible answer. Silence is not.
What this is not.
In a house whose approval depends on its quality system holding, a vendor who is vague about this is a risk. So, plainly:
Not a quality system of record. Your NCR, MRB and disposition process is untouched. Nothing here sits inside your approved quality system, and adopting it changes nothing you would have to re-approve.
Not a compliance verdict. Fieldmark shows coverage and evidence — which clauses have floor proof behind them and which are thin. It does not tell you that you are compliant, and you should not buy anything that claims it can.
Not a route around the NCR. When something meets the threshold it goes to your existing process with the observation attached as evidence. The failure mode we design against by name is soft grading — a convenient place to park things that should have been non-conformances. A tool that makes it easier to avoid raising an NCR is a liability, not a quality system.
Not asking operators to make a call. A capture is an observation, not a disposition. The authority to decide what something is stays exactly where it already sits.
Not testimony, and not a scorecard. A photograph with a timestamp is evidence — nobody has to be believed. And nobody's name becomes a number on a chart: a channel people get punished for using goes quiet in a fortnight.
The mechanics, if you want them: how a flag gets closed and how evidence attaches to a clause.
Bring the last five things you fixed without writing up.
One site, four days on your floor, and the team doing the capturing themselves.
Talk about your floor.
Tell us how your site runs today. You'll leave knowing what the first week would look like on your site and what it costs, whether or not you go further.