GLP SOPs for equipment calibration and maintenance part 3: process mapping for SOP development

Ask almost anyone who has been involved in writing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) about how they learned to do it and chances are the answer will be that they just sat down and wrote their ideas, maybe using a standard format. Although process flows and flow charts have been an integral part of the computer world for as long as most care to remember, it has only been in the past decade or so that the concepts of process design and process flows have started to enter the realm of SOP development in the pharmaceutical industry. In this installment of the series, we will describe one process design approach to developing SOPs for a laboratory. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.