Why are sops important

Consistency is the key to running a successful business. Companies may sell different things, but overall, they rely on the consistency of the products and work they produce so their customers stay satisfied. When you write SOPs, everyone is following a standardized procedure to produce results. It leaves little room for error and is designed to produce consistent results. When you have standard operating procedures, you make hiring and retaining employees a lot easier.

New employees could use SOP to learn important things about your business. This can be a tool that helps them get up to speed on their own time and take the pressure off of you. Overall, the SOP can act as a guide that can help everyone on your staff improve their work and ensure that everything is running correctly.

You can remove the ambiguity from some tasks, and make the desired outcomes of tasks very apparent. Employees will be able to be more productive. This can help you save money on overtime fees for extra work and can reduce the possibility of errors in the work they produce. When you take the time to write down the way people do things, it gets a lot easier to see where you have gaps in service.

See how many things you change about the way you operate once you take the time to examine how you do things. You never know what you can find when you write everything down. Employee safety is important for every business. An unsafe environment can do more than just result in injured employees. Depending on the complexity of the task and the experience of employees, SOPs may not completely substitute for training. Documented procedures are a valuable component of the new-hire toolkit, and can reduce training time.

They act as reference guides and allow new employees to work independently without excessive reliance on supervisors. New hires make ideal testing grounds for the effectiveness of SOPs. If the documented steps enable the new employee to complete the task, the procedures are sound. If any steps are unclear, confusing or no longer in use, the SOP should be updated.

Information may be abridged and therefore incomplete. There are some factors which determine what type of SOP to use or create. Refer to Table 1. Routine procedures that are short and require few decisions can be written in a format of simple steps. Long procedures consisting of more than 10 steps with few decisions should be written along with a graphical format or hierarchical steps.

Procedures that require many decisions should be written with an accompanying flow chart. Each SOP should follow a standard format. Information should be conveyed clearly and explicitly to remove any doubt as to what is required. The active voice and present verb tense should be used. A flow chart should be used to illustrate the process being described. Documentation should be designed to ensure that steps are followed in a specific order. Any documentation included as part of an activity should be referenced in the procedure where they are to be used and then attached to the SOP.

All documentation used during the execution of a procedure becomes part of the batch record file. Identifying a need, writing and managing Standard Operating Procedures is highly developed within a pharmaceutical company. The organization should have a procedure in place for determining what processes need to be documented.

These individuals are essentially subject-matter experts who actually perform the work or use the process.

By fully understanding your current processes, you will make the best choice for your organizations. An SOP is a useful business tool as it communicates the correct way of carrying out an activity within your organization. Standard Operating Procedures at a minimum give you the following:. Creating more structure in your business activities can dramatically improve productivity and reduce costs.

Not every organization will benefit from this kind of standardization, and it depends on you, the business owner or manager, to determine if there are work processes that can be duplicated every day within your company and if it's worth teaching those processes to employees through SOPs.

Many great benefits can be realized by bringing standardizing processes and documenting formal SOPs to your organization. Ready to automate the entire lifecycle of your controlled documents and create your SOPs? You may be interested in downloading our IT SOP Template starter pack to help outline what you need to maintain control and compliance with regulations.

Montrium also offers an SOP writing and review service to assure compliance with the current GxP requirements. To keep all of your SOPs managed in one place, our Quality Connect electronic quality management system comes with an SOP Management module designed to manage all controlled documents that form part of your quality system.

Easy access, centralized distribution, and intuitive workflows ensure that quality and compliance are at the heart of your operations. Pharmaceutical Reviews. Oliver heads up Montrium's Commercialization team and is a regular contributor to the Montrium blog. Oliver writes on a wide range of topics that tie in his passion for technology and his deep understanding of the regulatory requirements.

Montrium is a knowledge based company, that focuses on leveraging its deep understanding of GxP processes and technologies to provide cost-effective solutions to life science organizations.

What are SOPs? Quality Assurance. Why do you need SOPs at your organization? Standard Operating Procedures at a minimum give you the following: Consistency — The number one reason for procedures is consistency in the way an individual carries out a particular task or activity.