Standard Operating Procedure

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs):

1.       Currently, potential customers can enter many factories or service facilities and ask to view the International Standards Organization (ISO) manuals and supporting documentation. In general, this documentation is supposed to be easily available to anyone in these companies and to reflect accurately the most current practices. Creating and maintain these documents requires significant and ongoing expense.

2.       Also, companies generally have specific procedures that govern the practices that must be documented and the requirements for that documentation.

3.       Multiple considerations motivate these documentation efforts.

4.       First, customer companies often simply require ISO certifications of various types from all suppliers.

5.       Second, for pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and many other companies where government regulations play a major role, a high level of documentation is legally necessary.

6.       Third, even if neither customers nor laws demand it, some managers decide to document business practices simply to improve quality.

7.       This documentation can limit product, process, and/or service design changes and facilitate communication and a competition of ideas among the company’s best experts.

Proposed SOP Process:

1.       There is no universally accepted way to document standard operating procedures (SOPs).

2.       This method has no legal standing in any business sector. Instead, it mainly serves to emphasize the importance of documentation, which is often the practical end-product of a process improvement or design engineering project.

3.       In some sense, the precise details in SOPs are the system inputs that project teams can actually control and evaluate. If your company has thorough and well-maintained SOPs, then the goals of SQC and DOE methods are to evaluate and improve the SOPs.

4.       There are specific methods for evaluating measurement SOPs, for example, gauge R&R for evaluating manufacturing SOPs such as SPC charts. In the proposed approach, a team of relevant people assemble and produce the SOP so that there is “buy-in” among those affected. The SOP begins with a “title,” designed to help the potential users identify that this is the relevant and needed SOP.

Example(Detailed Paper Helicopter Manufacturing SOP) Provide a detailed SOP for producing paper helicopters?

Answer: Table below contains a SOP for paper helicopter manufacturing.