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Num relance
- 1.A publicly listed European industrial group is rolling Soperion out to 13 plants after a pilot — selected against evaluated alternatives.
- 2.After 2 days of on-site key-user training, 6 of the customer's key users created 10 approval-ready SOPs in one hour — on real processes, not demo material.
- 3.From day 1 after training, the teams created standards independently, with no Soperion staff on site.
- 4.The numbers in this article come from productive operation — not from a proof of concept and not from demo material.
A publicly listed European industrial group selected Soperion against evaluated alternatives and is rolling out to 13 plants after the pilot. The pilot numbers — without marketing rounding.
Most software case studies quote percentages without a baseline and testimonials without context. This one is built differently: it documents what happened in one specific pilot plant of a European industrial group — how long the rollout took, who created the SOPs, and what the decision for the 13-plant rollout was based on. The customer's name stays unpublished at the group's request.
The starting point: knowledge in heads, standards in folders
The pilot plant faced the problem almost every manufacturing operation knows: the critical procedures — changeovers, start-up sequences, quality checks — lived in the experience of individual employees, not in the documentation. The existing standards sat as PDF files in folder structures nobody opened during the shift, and went stale faster than anyone could maintain them.
The consequence was measurable: one process, three shifts, three different executions. Manual re-documentation was off the table — at an industry-typical 4 to 8 hours per work instruction and over 1,000 instructions per plant, it would have become a person-years project that would never have been prioritized.
The pilot plant: 2 days of training, then independent
The rollout in the pilot plant followed a fixed sequence: 2 days of on-site key-user training, 6 key users from production and quality management. Training happened not on demo material but on the plant's real processes — the first approval-ready SOP was created during the training itself.
The moment the plant's decision-makers were convinced comes down to one number: directly after the short training, the customer's key users created 10 SOPs in one hour — via Video-to-SOP, with their own smartphones, on the running process. From day 1 after training, the teams worked independently, with no Soperion staff on site.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| On-site key-user training | 2 days |
| Key users trained | 6 |
| SOPs created by key users right after training | 10 in one hour |
| Independent standard creation by the teams | from day 1 |
| Rollout decision | 13 plants, Europe-wide |
Voices from the pilot plant
“This is exactly what we need.” — plant manager of the pilot plant. The statement came not after a presentation, but after his own key users had created the first SOPs on their own process.
“It convinces me, saves a great deal of time, and gets us to the point where we can run trainings much faster. To me this looks like absolute added value.” — quality manager of the pilot plant. The QM perspective is the most critical one in the room: whoever is responsible for audit readiness checks document control, versioning, and the approval trail first.
“It is not just SOP — you can do much more with it.” — key user. And from a sister plant that saw the pilot results: “I am thrilled. I hope we can use this at our site soon.”
From pilot to rollout: 13 plants
After the pilot plant, the group decided on a Europe-wide rollout to 13 plants — won against evaluated alternatives the group had assessed in parallel. The deciding factor was not a single feature but the combination: creation scales through the customer's own employees instead of external documentation teams, and document control, versioning, and QR-code delivery are included in the same platform.
For a rollout, one property matters more than any demo: reproducibility. An onboarding model that took 2 days in the pilot plant can be planned across 13 plants — with a calculable training effort per site and without months-long project phases.
What transfers to other plants
The pilot-plant numbers are not an outlier; they follow from the creation model: when the process expert films and the software structures, speed depends on the number of processes, not on writing capacity. 10 SOPs in one hour is achievable wherever processes are accessible and key users are allowed to film — independent of industry and plant size.
The honest caveat: approval remains human work. Subject-matter review by the process owner is required for every standard — it takes minutes per SOP, but it does not disappear. If you read a case study where the review is “automatic” too, be skeptical.
Perguntas frequentes
- How fast do a customer's own employees create SOPs with Soperion?
- In the pilot plant of a European industrial group, 6 key users created 10 approval-ready SOPs in one hour directly after a 2-day training — on real processes, with their own smartphones. From day 1 after training, the teams worked independently.
- Why is the customer's name not published?
- The group agreed to publishing the numbers, not the name. That is common in B2B — publicly listed companies rarely release supplier references for open publication.
- Do the pilot-plant results transfer to other industries?
- Yes, because the speed comes from the creation model, not from the industry: the process expert films, the software structures. The only requirement is that processes may be filmed — faces are anonymized automatically.