Why are Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) important?
Why are Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) important? The diagram shows my now favorite Lean quotation of all time from Taiichi Ohno, the “Father of Lean.” “Without standards, there can be no improvement.”
Why would Taiichi proclamation?
make
such
a
bold
It’s because of that slippery slope between the bottom of the slope shown here, which represents where most companies are, with no standards (SOPs), no documented processes at all or just as bad, what I call “wallpaper” standards that aren’t kept up to date and that nobody is using or following. Still, management that are divorced from the Gemba get to think that they have SOPs in place, when clearly to any objective view that they do not! We created the GembaDocs software in order to reduce the burden of this Develop – Document - Improve process, making it possible to create or edit Standard Operating Procedures within minutes, not hours or days. It really is a gamechanger making it possible to create and maintain those “backstops” that prevents the solid ball of your process rolling down the Quality, Cost and Customer Experience hill!
This next diagram makes it even more clear that Standards are literally the “foundation of Lean”.
This schematic is often used to demonstrate the Toyota Production System, represented as a “House Of Lean” with Customer Satisfaction and Business Success as the apex of the roof, supported by the pillars of Just In Time, Respect for People (Culture) and Jidoka techniques.
The foundation of the temple is “Stability and Standardization” with Standard Operation / Standard Operating Procedures / SOPs as one of those key principles. When I hold training workshops for GembaDocs customers, one of the lines I always use is this, “You can have all the culture you want but without Stability and Standardization your Lean efforts are built on sand." How often have you or your team made a great change to a process, only to come back a few days later to find out that nobody is following it? That can be very frustrating. That’s why have a clear process of how the Standard Operating Procedures (as we examined in “How to write an SOP”) are documented is key.