SOP Glossary

A standardised graphical notation for drawing business processes as flowcharts that both business and technical people can read.

An ongoing effort to improve products, processes, and services by making small changes regularly, rather than relying on big one-time initiatives.

Training employees to perform tasks outside their primary role so the team can cover absences, balance load, and keep operations running.

The structured process of bringing a new hire from offer letter to fully productive team member, covering paperwork, training, and role-specific qualification.

The discipline of capturing, organising, and sharing what an organisation knows so that the right information reaches the right people at the right time.

The practice of recording how work gets done so that the knowledge lives outside one person's head, in a form others can read, follow, and improve.

A structured set of policies, procedures, and records that an organisation uses to meet quality requirements and improve over time.

An SOP defines how a process works end to end. A work instruction tells one operator how to perform one specific task within that process.

A documented set of step-by-step instructions that defines how a recurring task or process should be performed.

A lean manufacturing concept: the current best-known way to perform a task, defined precisely enough to be repeated and improved.

The undocumented know-how that lives only in the heads of experienced workers and walks out the door when they leave.

A task-level document that tells one person, at one workstation, exactly how to perform a specific job using specific tools.