What Are the Signs Your Work Instructions Need an Upgrade?

Many mistakes on the shop floor come from the system people work in rather than from the people themselves: instructions that are unclear, out of date or hard to find. By writing clear work instructions, companies can improve their systems and reduce errors and accidents. Improving systems starts with looking at a company's work instructions and standardized operating procedures (SOPs).

Signs your work instructions need an update

Updating your work instructions is difficult

Documentation should be a celebrated aspect of continuous improvement. However, many employees actively avoid documenting procedures because their system for creating work instructions is too tedious or difficult to work with. Documenting standards creates a baseline for continuous improvement, so when employees are discouraged from writing things down, continuous improvement will be negatively affected as a result. When you document and standardize a process, by nature, it immediately starts becoming outdated. Operators naturally find better ways of performing tasks, new methods are introduced, parts and tools change, etc. If the process for updating procedures is bureaucratic and cumbersome, documents will quickly become outdated and ineffective.

Your work instructions are constantly outdated

When documents don't reflect the reality of the work, employees will resort to grandfathered knowledge and best guesses, rather than the approved standards. The result is a lack of standardization and weaker quality control. If your documents constantly feel like they're outdated, this is a substantial indicator that your system for work instructions needs a faster method for revising and improving documentation.

Your work instructions are difficult to access

Finding the correct document may seem like a simple task, but if you're like most companies, your organization has accumulated thousands upon thousands of files over the years. Large binders of dense, and likely outdated materials. Even if documents are digitized, when using multiple systems to create, manage, and store work instructions, finding the correct documents can be just as difficult as with their paper-based counterparts. If you are struggling to find the right work instructions relevant to your job, then it might be time to upgrade to a system that is more streamlined in its approach to document management and accessibility.

Your work instructions are not being used

Probably the most common indicator that your work instructions are ineffective — nobody is using them. Many times, technical writers, engineers, or training specialists, go through the effort of creating and documenting standardized procedures, but the documents end up collecting dust because they are not clear enough, inaccurate, outdated or difficult to access and keep updated.

You can't prove who saw which version

An auditor or customer asks which version of an instruction an operator was working from on a given shift, and whether they had read the latest change. If the answer involves digging through signed sheets, training binders and email threads, or there is no answer at all, your system is not doing its job. For standards such as IATF 16949, being able to show that the current instruction was available at the workstation, and that people were trained on it, is part of the requirement. A good system keeps that record as a side effect of normal work: every version, every approval, every confirmation, with a date and a name.

Conclusion

Work instructions have become an indispensable part of everyday life in many companies. They provide structure, serve as knowledge mediators and support the optimization of business processes through standardization. By switching to digital work instructions, you have a powerful tool for making the knowledge of your employees visible. Going digital also makes them a lot easier to keep up to date, and with REWO Analytics you have a record of who viewed and confirmed which version, and when.

Read next: REWO Analytics · IATF 16949 work instructions at the workstation · Quality & compliance teams