“With Hurley Write’s help, we’ve been able to eliminateSOPs that no longer apply to our processes and revise those that do. It’s a work in progress, but we are making progress.”
A multinational pharma company’s standard operating procedures (SOPs)were inconsistent, hard to follow, and many were duplicates. Many of the documented processes were outdated and overlapped, creating confusion and leading to inconsistent outcomes.
The company had two goals, the first of which was to understand what SOPs were duplicated, unnecessary, and outdated. The second goal was to train the writers on strategies to write user-friendly SOPs. The company had no process in place to cross-reference SOPs, resulting in duplicates.
In addition, the SOP writers had not been trained to process map and therefore wrote SOPs without understanding where any given process began and ended.
The SOPs themselves did not follow best practices in terms of language use, graphics, and basic usability. The result was SOPs that used unfamiliar language and terminology, hard-to-read sentences, and graphics that failed to augment the steps.
We conducted a gap analysis of the SOPs to discover which were duplicated; this analysis helped us determine where process mapping was needed and what we needed to do to determine which SOPs were current and which were outdated.
Once our gap analysis was completed, we could then focus on where the SOPs were lacking in terms of usability and create training for the SOP writers.
At our three-month follow-up, the company reported that the team was rewriting the SOPs that we had identified as most problematic and were deleting or combining the duplicates based on our recommendations. The company also indicated that compliance to rewritten SOPs had increased and the quality ofthe SOPs had increased after our classes.
At our six-month follow-up, based on our recommendations and with our help, the company created templates that included guidance. The company reported that the templates were being used consistently and had helped the writers write the SOPs more quickly, with the added benefit that the SOPs needed less review and rewrite.
“With Hurley Write’s help, we’ve been able to eliminateSOPs that no longer apply to our processes and revise those that do. It’s a work in progress, but we are making progress.”
