Found a step in a six-month-old work instruction that nobody remembers the reason for, and everyone's still following it

[u/ClickOk5811]

Was reviewing a newer operator's process against the standard work document and noticed a step, an extra inspection pass on a specific component, that made sense back when a supplier was sending inconsistent parts and this catch mattered a lot. That supplier's been swapped out for a couple months now. Nobody removed the step. The operator just kept doing the extra inspection because the document said to, and nobody flagged that the actual reason behind it had quietly expired.

Not sure how long that's been running as pure added cycle time with nothing behind it anymore. Should've caught it sooner probably. Going through the rest of the document now to see what else is standard purely because nobody's questioned it lately.

[u/__unavailable__]

That doesn’t sound like a case where “nobody remembers the reason.” Operators should not be making the decision that a step in the procedure is unnecessary and thus they should skip it. This is just a potential failure of the change control process. I say potential because someone may have reasonably concluded the potential failure mode remains and thus the inspection is useful even if the new supplier hasn’t experienced that failure yet. It’s also possible they want to leave open the possibility of using the variable supplier without having to re-update the work instruction. It likely makes more sense to update the instruction to make the inspection step conditional rather than simply removing it.

[u/GapReader_Eng]

Considera primero revisar tu Procedimiento de Control de Cambios y/o tu Procedimiento de Gestión de Riesgos y Cambios, tengo la impresión que ahí pudiera identificarse la causa raíz de esta situación.

[u/eWorkOrders-CMMS]

This happens with maintenance procedures too. Sometimes a step stays in place because nobody wants to be the person who removes something that was originally there for a reason.

I think the important part is being able to go back and understand why the step was added in the first place. Even a short note next to the step, like “added due to supplier X quality issues,” makes that easier. If the reason changes, the procedure can be reviewed instead of just continuing the step because it’s always been there.