The Purpose of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in Chemical Manufacturing

 The Purpose of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in Chemical Manufacturing

Chemists with post-graduate educations including experimental laboratory training are expected to know a variety of safe and effective ways to achieve common chemical goals. As well, they are expected to have document research skills sufficient to find approved methods for unfamiliar operations. They do not need standard operating procedures. In fact standard operating procedures may be fatal to new discoveries.

  Chemical processes are executed by operators, who are trained differently. Operators are most valued because they can follow instructions of a process in a totally reproducible and detailed fashion while watching and reporting anything unusual. Often they may not know the theoretical basis behind the exact operations that they need to perform.

It is desirable to provide every possible means to assist them to do their work methodically so that an operation is performed precisely the same way each time whether it is part of one process or another and no matter which operator is in charge. This is the purpose of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in the manufacturing environment. SOPs can also be written for operations for analyses, for receiving, for shipping, for reporting accidents, for filling out batch sheets etc. SOPs help to achieve faithful and exact repetition of a procedure wherever a specific action is called for. It is not the basis for a decision between alternate actions. What sets an exceptional operator or analyst apart from an ordinary one are two things- detailed exact repetitive execution and the ability to observe small differences in what happens, remember them, and report them.