Welcome to our new website, SOP MD.  Since 2004, Select Tech Professional Services has been specializing in helping businesses determine their best practices and then provided an online platform they could use to share these with their employees, both existing and new.  These SOPs have helped businesses establish their expectations of their employees.  Our platform will test these employees and then the owners and managers can hold staff accountable for following the system. 

We’ll also be blogging regularly on the topic and invite your active participation in that process.

Managing systems is much easier than managing people.  The key is finding people who can be trained to follow the system and then making sure they actually do.  It’s the Ray Kroc model of McDonald’s restaurants.  Kroc said, “”The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.”  The only way to operate under this philosophy is for the “organization” to have a system.  That’s what SOP MD offers you, the flexibility to create your own SOPs, enhance them with photos, videos, screenshots, hyperlinks and more.

All truly lean businesses have, at their core, a set of standard operating procedures.  One of the 5S’s is Standardize (Seiketsu in Japanese).  But who wants to read through an operations manual?  I remember my son’s friend, having just graduated from college, who was handed a 350 page operations manual and given two weeks to sit in his office to review them.  What a way to start a new job.  Boring, uninspiring, horrible first impression.  No one wants to sit down and read an operations manual.  So break the mold, make it more appealing.  Hit different learning styles with your SOPs.

In future posts we’ll highlight this and much more.  Stay tuned, and please participate.  I’d love to get your feedback.  Thanks

Mark Claypool
October 5, 2009
SOP MD