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.

More recent survey-based studies have indicated that, although many companies are involved in benchmarking, adoption of best practices is not as high as might be expected. This study was undertaken to identify the factors that have an impact on the adoption decision of manufacturing best practices. A review of the relevant literature identified ten potential factors. These can be classified into three categories: best practice factors, organizational factors, and environmental factors. Best practice factors include codification, complexity, compatibility, perceived operational benefits, and cost. Organizational factors include satisfaction with the existing practice, existence of champion, and organizational resource availability. Finally, environmental factors include perceived outside support and external pressures. The results indicated that cost of adoption, external pressures, and satisfaction with the existing practice are the main determinants of the adoption decision. These results should be of considerable interest to practitioners.

Little is known about the costs of safety. A literature review conducted for this study indicates there is a lack of survey-based research dealing with the effects of occupational health and safety (OHS) prevention costs. To close this gap in the literature, this study investigates the interwoven relationships between OHS prevention costs, employee satisfaction, OHS performance and accident costs. Data were collected from 159 OHS management system 18001-certified firms operating in Turkey and analyzed through structural equation modeling. The findings indicate that OHS prevention costs have a significant positive effect on safety performance, employee satisfaction and accident costs savings; employee satisfaction has a significant positive effect on accident costs savings; and occupational safety performance has a significant positive effect on employee satisfaction and accident costs savings. Also, the results indicate that safety performance and employee satisfaction leverage the relationship between prevention costs and accident costs.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify the pre adoption decision factors that have an influence on the implementation success of manufacturing best practices (MBP). This study also investigates whether successful implementation of best practices leads to operational performance improvement.Design/methodology/approachA survey research based on 55 MBP was conducted. Regression analysis was employed to test the proposed relationships.FindingsCodification, compatibility and innovativeness of organizational culture were found to have an impact on implementation success. On the other hand, complexity, absorptive capacity, external support and the existence of champion were not emerged as the determinants of implementation. It was also found that successful implementation would lead to operational performance improvement.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample size is a limitation to this study.Practical implicationsKnowing the significant determinants of implementation success, practitioners will make a better selection among competing MBP. Also, practitioners will also be able to utilize their resources better, because they will know what they should look for in each benchmarking visit. A positive significant relationship between the implementation success and performance indicated that benchmarking is an effective technique.Originality/valueThis study is the first to explore pre adoption factors that may have an influence on the implementation of MBP. Davies and Kochhar reported that studies of relationships between MBP and performance in the area of manufacturing are limited. Therefore, this work also made a contribution to this under researched area.

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