The term “standard operating procedure” (SOP) makes me cringe. It brings up feelings of bloated bureaucracies who can’t think on their feet or who are stuck in their ways. This a bad misperception of a really important tool for companies of all sizes. I know everyone wants all tasks to be done auto-magically by a software system that performs perfectly. Until that day arrives, the first step toward automation is actually much more boring—you have to standardize how you perform the tasks manually before you can even think about automating them.

Lots of assumptions are made on the path towards automation. I’ve seen so many print owners “assume” that a certain area of their business is operating consistently and optimally. Then when we dive into that area and speak with multiple resources, we find that each person has “their way” of performing a task which results in slightly different outcomes.  When you bring those resources together in a collaborative way, it doesn’t usually take too long to come to an agreement on the optimal procedural steps to complete the task. Great things happen when you do this inside your business because it gets the very people who are performing the tasks to give their valuable input on how to perform the task more efficiently. This is the first step towards automation.

This is also called a “standard operating procedure.”