Process description example and template (ISO 9001)

A process description records how a work process runs: what goes in, which steps there are, who carries them out, what comes out, and how you know it is going well. The term “process description” does not appear in the standard. ISO 9001 does require you to determine the processes of your management system and to keep documented information about them, to the extent necessary (clause 4.4). The management system standards come from the Dutch standards publisher NEN (Royal Netherlands Standardisation Institute) . If you work with ISO 9001, also read the process description example for ISO 9001 and mapping your processes.

The standard does not prescribe a fixed form. A process description may be a table, a flowchart or a page of text. What matters is that someone who does not know the process can follow it, and that an auditor can check whether you do what you describe.

What is the difference from a work instruction?

A process description describes the whole. A work instruction describes one action in detail. A quotation process, for example, has one process description and ten work instructions, such as “making a cost estimate in the calculation tool”.

Feature	Process description	Work instruction
Scope	The whole process, from start to finish	One task or action
Reader	Management, auditor, new colleague	The employee carrying out the task
Contains	Purpose, owner, steps, links, measurement points	Concrete steps, settings, screens
Length	One to three pages	Half a page to two pages
Refers to	Work instructions and records	The system or tool

Start with the process description. Write work instructions only when a task produces errors or is often done wrongly.

Template for a process description

Use this structure for every process. Fill in the fields, and leave them empty if they do not apply, but do not delete them.

Field	What you enter	Example
Process name	A short, recognisable name	Making a quotation
Purpose	Why does this process exist?	Give a customer an appropriate quotation within five working days
Owner	Who is responsible for the process?	Sales employee
Input	What goes into the process?	Customer request, site survey
Steps	The main steps in order	1 register the request, 2 site survey, 3 estimate, 4 send the quotation
Output	What comes out?	Quotation in the CRM, recorded with the customer
Links	Which other processes or systems?	Planning, purchasing, invoicing
Measurement points	What do you measure to see whether it works?	Throughput time, percentage of accepted quotations
Risks	What could go wrong, and what do you do about it?	Site survey forgotten: checklist in the CRM
Records	Which documents do you keep?	Quotation log, approval of the estimate

Example: process description “Making a quotation”

An installation company with twelve employees wants to record its quotation process. The core is shown below. The full description runs to a few pages, but the steps remain recognisable.

Purpose: give a customer a quotation within five working days of the request, which matches the site survey.

Owner: the sales employee, who also manages the CRM (customer relationship management system).

Steps:

The request comes in through the contact form or by phone. The employee registers it straight away in the CRM (the customer management system), with the name, address and desired date.
The employee schedules a site survey within two working days. The surveyor uses the survey checklist.
The surveyor records the findings in the app. If the findings deviate from the checklist, they call the sales employee.
The estimate is drawn up with the calculation tool. Materials and hours follow the fixed rate sheet.
A second person checks the estimate for calculation errors and margin. This is recorded with a date in the CRM.
The quotation goes to the customer within one working day, with the standard terms attached.
If the customer accepts, the job is scheduled. If there is no response after ten days, one reminder follows.

Measurement points: throughput time from request to quotation, and the percentage of quotations accepted per month.

Risk: the survey is not carried out, or is recorded incompletely. Countermeasure: the survey checklist is mandatory in the app before the estimate starts.

In the example, always write who does what, and where the evidence is. A sentence such as “the quotation is drawn up carefully” does not help an auditor, because nobody can check what “carefully” means.

Step by step: writing a process description

Name the process and its purpose

Start with one sentence about what the process delivers. If you cannot write that sentence, the process is not yet clear enough to describe.

Walk through the process

Sit with the people who do the work. Write down what they actually do, not what is on paper. The gap between the two is often the first finding at an internal audit.

Put the steps in order

Note the main steps, not every mouse click. Five to eight steps is usually enough. More than that makes it unreadable.

Link the measurement points to objectives

A measurement point only makes sense if you know what you do with it. Link it to an objective from your management review, or to the PDCA cycle of your system.

Identify the risks

At each step, ask: what could go wrong here? A risk matrix helps you rank the main risks, so you place the countermeasures where they matter.

Have someone else check the process

Ask a colleague who does not know the process to follow the description. Where they get stuck, the text is not yet good enough.

What does the auditor want to see in a process description?

The auditor wants to see that the description matches practice. They compare the text with what they see in the process. That means:

The owner knows and uses the description.
The steps match what employees actually do.
There are measurement points, linked to the system.
The description has a date and a version number, and has been approved.
The references to work instructions and records work.

Common mistakes

A description nobody uses. Write the description as the process works, not as it should work on paper. An auditor sees the difference immediately.

Too much detail. If the process description runs to ten pages, nobody reads it. Move the detail into work instructions.

No owner. A process without an owner is not maintained. Name one person, not a department.

Versions nobody keeps track of. Put a version number and date on the description, and keep old versions.

No link to the standard’s requirements. Link your processes to the clauses of the standard, for example through the High Level Structure (HLS). Otherwise nobody can check whether all requirements are covered.