Standard Operating Procedures are the key to business success. With developed and detailed SOPs, you can ensure that your internal operations are completed to the highest standard and are complied with by all of your audiences, helping your company work more uniformly.
But, sometimes creating, managing, and improving SOPs can be difficult. Whether this is because current SOPs are outdated, or because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to manage all of your SOPs, having the help of tools and applications can be a great way for your business to stay on top of this so that your company's performance is not impeded. This is where SOP software comes into play.
The right SOP software can work wonders for streamlining the creation of your SOPs as well as assisting in managing, updating, and sharing them with your team and stakeholders. In this article, we’ve delved into the 7 best SOP software and tools that you can utilise to enhance your business operations.
- What is SOP software?
- What are the benefits of SOP software?
- 7 SOP software and tools for your business
- What should I look for in an SOP software or tool?
- Time to choose your SOP software
What is SOP software?
Standard Operating Procedures are a written set of guidelines or instructions which outline the step-by-step process to complete an operation within a business. They ensure that procedures are followed consistently within a business, aligning operations to support success and productivity in the workplace.
A standard operating procedure software works to help implement your SOPs by allowing you to easily access, edit, share, and store them in one place conveniently. Thanks to the development of ample SOP software, businesses can take full control of their standard processes by creating comprehensive step-by-step guidelines which ensure that a workplace is compliant, productive, and functioning effectively.
What are the benefits of SOP software?
Given that SOP documentation is a vital element of success for any business, there are several key benefits to utilising standard operating procedure software to help you achieve the best possible outcomes for your business. We’ve hashed these out below.
Alleviates risk
Standard operating procedure software can offer specific frameworks for your SOPs which ensure that your processes remain compliant with wider industry requirements and eliminate any risk of human error whilst they are being produced. This improves risk management as a result.
Increases efficiency
SOP software can help your organisation streamline its processes by offering the structure and guidelines you need to follow to produce effective SOPs. In doing this, you can ensure that your business is working as efficiently as possible.
Supports the simple management of your SOP documents
SOP management software allows you to keep a record of your SOPs and manage them all in one place. This is particularly important given that multiple people will have access to this software at the same time, so you’ll always be able to see the latest versions of your SOPs stored safely in this application.
Enhances the training and onboarding process
Thanks to SOP software, your training and onboarding processes become more streamlined. All of your standardised procedures for your organisation are readily available in one place, which is beneficial for current employees to gain the same training, and new employees to be onboarded consistently.
Improves communication and collaboration
Given how easy it is to share standard operating procedures using SOP software, collaboration will be enhanced within your organisation. This also makes it much simpler to gain feedback from your audiences to continue to improve your SOPs so that they’re as comprehensive as possible.
Reduces costs and saves time
Using SOP software can considerably reduce the time you spend developing SOPs with their existing frameworks and compliance checks. In turn, this significantly reduces costs for your business by making your processes more efficient, which increases your business productivity and minimises any operational risks.
Improves compliance
With SOP software, you can ensure that your business and its employees remain as compliant as possible by aligning with internal regulations, legal requirements, and industry standards. This is critical to protect your business and its employees.
7 SOP software and tools for your business
Now it’s time to get down to it - what SOP software and tools are best for your business? We’ve dissected the best SOP software that is currently on the market to help make the decision easier for you, exploring the main features and elements that make them so great for creating and managing your SOPs.
1. Touch Stay
Here at Touch Stay, our adaptable and accessible digital guidebooks can be used on all devices and allows you to create SOPs for, well, absolutely anything.
You can stay on top of sharing, managing, and creating SOPs regardless of what industry you are in, and reclaim your time and sanity by having all of your SOPs and important documents organised in one place for a streamlined and smart process. Our application is available offline for off-grid scenarios, and can be customised to your liking with your own logo, colours, and content, meaning the days of dull, written documents are behind you!
Our range of existing templates covers a variety of industries, meaning you’ll likely already find an SOP template that you can use as the foundation for your business SOPs. You can also create your own personalised and unique SOPs that are visually engaging.
But, what’s so unique about us is that if you can’t find a readily available template that you need on our app, you can get in touch with us to share your unique use case so that we can help you bring your vision to life!
2. SweetProcess
SweetProcess is an SOP software and platform which allows businesses to create SOPs as well as manage and share them between teams. It is a cloud-based service that prides itself on its ability to create accessible SOPs for its users.
One of the benefits of SweetProcess is that it offers its users the opportunity to create visually engaging SOPs, whether with visual diagrams, checklists, or workflows, which offers SOP information in a more digestible and compelling format.
SweetProcess’ platform is easy to use and doesn’t require much learning to utilise its capabilities to their full potential. For basic SOP software, SweetProcess ticks all of the boxes.
3. Trainual
Third in our list of the best SOP software is Trainual. Trainual was designed to help organisations onboard team members smoothly and deliver effective compliance training within businesses.
Ticking off one of the core features necessary from SOP software, Trainual has a centralised system that allows for all of your organisation’s processes, documents, and policies to be kept together for maximum convenience and accessibility.
Using Trainual, you can also assign roles to different team members or departments to ensure responsibility and ownership are assigned, increasing accountability within your team. You can also easily integrate Trainual with your existing workflow programs and software, including Slack and other project management applications.
4. Process Street
Process Street is well known for its ability to create organised workflows and checklists that will help you better assign and manage tasks in your organisation.
The software uses AI to help manage and create SOPs in its application, which helps with the automation of tasks on the platform. It is also possible to gather feedback from employees using Process Street, whether this be through surveys or feedback forms, to help gain information regarding your SOPs and the platform itself.
Not only this, but it allows you to format your SOPs in its application in a visually appealing way. You can format your instructions using a variety of text options, including headers, and add in other media including images or videos, to better explain and contextualise your SOPs.
5. Dozuki
Dozuki is an SOP software designed specifically for industries that incorporate an element of manual labour, including automotive, food, and construction. As a result, its applications are suited largely to these fields only rather than more general SOP creation and management.
However, should you have a company that operates in one of these industries, Dozuki is a great standard operating procedure software to create SOPs and frameworks. It can produce simple to more technically advanced SOPs for your organisational processes and can build training programmes that are scalable for your team to streamline the way you work in these fields.
6. Way We Do
The cloud-based standard operating procedure software Way We Do is a powerful tool for crafting comprehensive SOPs and building adaptable workflows that you can continue to develop easily over time.
It has a variety of templates available, as well as checklists, to make your SOP creation all the easier, whilst helping you manage your internal operations at the same time. Similar to Trainual, in Way We Do you can make the most of assigning roles to individuals to increase accountability and responsibility across your team.
Most suitable for larger businesses and organisations, given that its capabilities are slightly more complex than other SOP software, Way We Do has a range of features that your company can make the most of.
7. Tallyfy
Finally, Tallyfy is an SOP software best used for automating your organisational tasks and crafting your SOP documents from the ground up. Tallyfy helps businesses take their SOP creation into their own hands, allowing you to identify your very best SOPs and feel empowered to use these as the skeleton for crafting future SOPs.
Tallyfy also works to support you in making your more complex workflows simpler, helping to execute this with its simple and user-friendly design. The software also offers features that encourage and enhance collaboration and communication, as well as improve transparency so that everyone is aware of your SOPs.
What should I look for in an SOP software or tool?
When it comes to choosing your SOP software, there are several basic features that you should look out for, which we’ve highlighted below:
Collaboration
A good SOP management software will allow for swift and easy collaboration between members of your team. This includes allowing you to delegate tasks, keep track of progress made, and work on creating, adapting and improving SOPs together in one place with ease.
Editing in real-time
In line with the above, your team’s SOP edits will be documented by your chosen SOP software in real time. This ensures that no matter who is viewing your SOPs, they can see what changes have been made so that your documents are always in their most up-to-date format to keep your SOP development moving forward.
Centralised information and management
You want to ensure that your standard operating procedure software stores all of your SOPs in a single central location so that your team can always quickly and easily access the information that they need. This also makes it easy to manage all of your documents going forward.
Integration
Ideally, you’ll want SOP software which can easily connect to any additional software that you may use to manage your team projects and tasks. This means you can easily integrate the management and creation of your SOPs seamlessly with your other applications.
Templates
Having templates already to hand on an SOP software can work wonders for your team by saving you the time of building them from scratch so that you can hit the ground running to create your SOPs. Templates also work well to ensure you maintain consistency when creating additional SOPs going forward.
Accessibility and security
In our current digital era, it’s an advantage for SOP software to have been adapted to suit a variety of digital technologies, whether computers, phones, or tablets. This offers increased flexibility and makes it all the more convenient for your team to be able to access and manage your SOPs wherever they may be with whatever device they’re using.
Equally, you want SOP software that has good security systems in place to keep your SOPs well-protected at all times, giving you the peace of mind that you need that your business procedures remain safe.
Time to choose your SOP software
In this guide, we’ve outlined the main features you should look out for when choosing your SOP tools, alongside the standard operating procedure software that we feel are some of the best on the market.
At Touch Stay, our digital guidebook application is exactly what you need to create visually engaging and comprehensive SOPs for any procedure to help streamline and maintain consistency across your operations.
Want to try it out for yourself? Sign up for a free 14-day trial of Touch Stay to start creating successful SOPs yourself and improve your organisational operations today.