Manufacturing Processes vs Procedures: Which, When, & Why?

Processes and procedures are a part of your everyday life, even if you don’t use those labels to describe them. Whether you’re getting ready for work or getting ready to launch a rocket, habitual actions with sequential movements are these guidelines at work.

That established, your get-out-of-bed processes aren’t as up for discussion in a manufacturing setting – it’s more of the manufacturing-and-launching-a-rocket procedures we need to discuss. So let’s go over the particular differences between processes and procedures in a factory setting (rockets not required).

How Do Processes & Procedures Work?

An important caveat: many organizations use the terms “process” and “procedure” interchangeably, especially in verbal instruction or casual conversation. This is absolutely fine, and is often unavoidable: the two have significant overlap. Also, some companies have internally decided that they are identical, to avoid confusion.

In this article, however, we’re getting into the granular – our discussion of processes and procedures is intended to help you choose which application of managerial control is best for fine-tuning your daily operations in a lean manufacturing setting.

The Difference Between Processes & Procedures

The International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, describes a process to be a "set of interrelated or interacting activities that use inputs to deliver an intended result." This makes the process the first step that describes how a certain goal is to be achieved.

The procedure, on the other hand, is the following set of steps towards a proposed goal. It is a more detailed description of the steps to be taken by the operator reading it. It is usually referred to as a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). A set of SOPs for a specific job to be done is referred to as a guidebook.

Practical Challenges Within Manufacturing

To prevent mismatches in documentation and audience, organizations must clearly define the depth and detail that will be included in each document and align that with the specific audience.

Processes generally describe the big picture, and in manufacturing likely involve many people in multiple roles and departments. They also typically span much longer periods of time, compared to procedures and work instructions. Additionally, processes will require multiple procedures over many sets of work instructions that detail every task.

Procedures will be more detailed than processes, providing specifics around the sequence of tasks or activities that make up a process. Of course, organizations have developed their own internal definition and application of each of these terms, but generally, the descriptions above are a safe, generic way to approach this conversation. In terms of real and actual standardization capability and value, it’s not the names of each that really matter, but the individual application and implementation.

In other words, a CEO will only waste valuable time attempting to reconfigure the overall workflow by tweaking an individual procedure, because the latter is too granular to have a broad impact. Similarly, a shop floor operator who only receives a broad overview of current processes will encounter difficulty following work instruction guidebooks because of the lack of detail within a process.

Policy vs Process vs Procedure

Let’s get a little crazy and throw “policies” into the mix. Where do they fit into the operational equation?

Examples of Policies

A good way to think of policies is to see them as necessary “overrides” within a manufacturing environment. In other words, policies are SOPs that are strict enough to apply to a general factory setting at all times regardless of the current job being done.

A great example of a policy is a safety rule such as “hard hats and steel-toed boots must be worn at all times while on the shop floor” because it is a standing requirement within the facility.

Policies can also be slightly more generalized, such as “edits to work instruction guidebooks must be confirmed by an engineering team lead before being applied to the central database”. In this case, there may be an official form that has to be filled out with the recommended updates, or a worker can have a brief conversation with a head engineer, depending on how strictly the company would like to mandate this policy.

Examples of Processes

So as discussed above, processes are activities that can be interrelated or interacting that, when connected, produce a result. Yes, this can be fairly vague, and depends on how the company in question would like to specifically define it.

A good example of a process would be a production line or an overview of a product life cycle. In this process, we don’t need to mention the exact details (such as the size and torque value of the bolts being applied) of every single step or action. It is a representation of the expected flow of the job at hand.

An example of a process for a product would be, “Chemically treat the raw materials, gather the treated materials and other supplies, complete assembly, and send the item to quality control before shipping”. In addition to this process, the complementary work instruction or guidebook would go into great detail about which parts go where and in what position, the order of assembly including manual motions, where to place the item so it can be transported to the quality workstation, etc.

Examples of Procedures

You’ve most likely come across procedures in scenarios where things have gone wrong or need to be corrected. For example, if there is a fire in the building, SOPs detail exactly where workers should stand, when and how they should exit the building, and whom they should alert to call the fire department. (This is more detailed than if we imagined a process for the same situation, which would look something like, “stop work, leave the area, wait until fire has been extinguished”.)

Procedures are also important elements of work instructions. For example, in assembly, you need more than mere processes to make sure everything is being put together correctly in an identical way to every other item on the line. Whereas a process will just stipulate that the parts need to be assembled, a procedure will outline, in detail, the order of assembly, the fasteners chosen for this job, the torque values and other measurements, mandatory ongoing manual checks for quality, etc.

Suggestions for Process Implementation Styles

Now, figuring out which of these tools – processes, policies, and procedures – to use for certain scenarios is highly dependent on your individual company’s culture and implementation style. Regardless, here are some key questions to ask when wondering how to go about continuously improving your shop floor via organizational oversight:

• Where is your communication bottleneck? Draw a flowchart of any breakdowns in communication among leaders, management, team leads, and shop floor workers. If one link is consistently poor, it’s a good idea to revisit the procedures specific to that team.
• Where in your workflow do you produce the most waste? Whether your waste is time, materials, manpower, movement, or something else, the best way to become more lean in your operations is to eliminate that waste via a more efficient process.
• Where do your workers ask for the most help, or give the most feedback? If there is large variation in carrying out job actions, or if your employees make a lot of errors or ask for assistance, then it is a good sign that you need to add more detailed procedures in your guidebooks.
• Which production scenarios are unaccounted for in your documentation? Try thinking of unlikely but possible situations that may occur in a safety, staffing, or workflow sense (such as unexpected downtime). It may not be relevant immediately, but it’s good to have documented procedures just in case this exact scenario does occur.