Standardization through process documentation

Abstract

Purpose - Consistency in operations is necessary for an organization's survival and growth. It is difficult to achieve consistency because of the employees' different ways of performing the same task. Employees' education, experience and skill levels determine their own styles and differences in their styles cause variations in process output. If process master's (best performers in a process) ways of performing their own tasks can be well documented, then a company will be able to standardize its operating procedures in their best forms. And, when employees follow these procedures, variations will be minimized and best quality products or services will be offered to customers. However, documenting such procedures is far from easy. The purpose of this paper is to propose a step-by-step framework on how to create process documents for standardization purposes. Design/methodology/approach - Qualitative research was adopted for this study. Published works in the process improvement, knowledge management (KM), and project management literatures were used to build the proposed framework. Findings - The roles of KM, semantics, and metadata schema were found very significant in creating process documents for standardization purposes. Practical implications - Serves as a guide to practitioners who desire to standardize their operations. Originality/value - A review of academic and business sources indicated that work on process standardization is conspicuously absent. This paper makes a contribution to fill this gap. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.