A great process plan is what turns "we should fix this" into actual change. With Trupeer, you can save hours on process planning by starting with a free process plan template, customizing it with your brand guidelines, and turning the plan into video updates that align stakeholders behind the change.

What is a process plan template, and which one do you need?

The term covers several different documents, which is worth resolving before you download anything, because searching for it returns project plans, schedules and improvement plans in roughly equal measure.

In manufacturing and operations engineering it has a precise meaning. A process plan, often called a routing or a route card, specifies how a particular item will be produced: the sequence of operations, the work centre or machine for each, the tooling, the setup and run times, and where inspection happens. It is the document that turns a drawing into instructions for the shop floor and into numbers for the planning system.

Elsewhere it is used loosely to mean any plan concerning a process, which usually turns out to be one of three other documents.

This page covers the first meaning properly, because it is a real artefact that nothing else in the search results addresses, and it points you at the right page for the other three.

The four documents people mean by process plan

A fifth possibility, if you are planning a piece of work with a start and an end rather than a repeating process, is a project plan, and our IT project plan template covers that shape.

If none of the first four is what you came for, the rest of this page will not help and one of those links will.

How to customize this template in Trupeer

Step 1: Open the Templates Section

Go to the Templates section from the main navigation.

Step 2: Select and Open a Template

Click on any template you want to work with to open it.

Step 3: Expand the Template View

If needed, expand the template view to see the full layout and details clearly.

Step 4: Edit the Template

Click on Edit to start modifying the selected template.

Within the editor, you can:

• Add new sections

• Define or update formatting rules

• Add a logo and adjust its position and related settings

Step 5: Save Your Customized Template

After making all necessary changes, click Save to store the updated template as your own.

Step 6: Preview and Fine-Tune the Template

When you want to see how your customized template looks, open the Preview.

From the preview screen, you can continue to make adjustments directly if needed, ensuring the template appears exactly as you want.

With a process plan template you can:

• Save hours on planning: Skip the blank page with a structure built for process change.

• Drive measurable improvement: Built-in sections for current state, target and metrics.

• Stay on-brand: Apply your logo, fonts and colors using Trupeer's brand kit.

• Roll out changes faster: Pair plans with video walkthroughs - perfect for change management.

• Standardize improvement: Use the same template for every process improvement.

• Reach global teams: Translate process plans into 65+ languages with one click.

Why a process plan is really a pricing document

Process plans are written by engineers and read by engineers, so they get treated as technical documents. They are not, or not only.

Every number downstream comes from them. The quote is derived from setup and run times. The schedule is derived from the same times. The capacity plan, the delivery date, the standard cost and the margin calculation all trace back to a routing somebody wrote once.

Which means a process plan is the most commercially consequential document in an operation, and it is the one with the weakest maintenance discipline. It gets created at part introduction by a process engineer, signed off, and then never looked at again unless something breaks.

Nobody owns it afterwards. There is no review trigger, no comparison against reality, and no field recording when anybody last checked. Meanwhile the process changes: a new machine halves a cycle, an extra operation gets added after a customer complaint, a fixture improves setup time.

The routing carries on saying what it said in the year it was written, and the business keeps quoting from it.

How standard times drift, and what it costs

The drift is not random and it does not average out, which is the part people get wrong.

Operations get added and never routed. A deburring step after a quality complaint, an extra inspection after an escape, a cleaning operation after a customer specification change. Each is performed, none is quoted, and the labour disappears into overhead where nobody can see it.

Machines get faster and routings do not. A new machine or better tooling cuts a cycle time, the shop floor benefits, and the routing keeps the old number. You then quote high on that part family and lose work you could have won profitably.

Setup times improve with familiarity. The first article setup on a new part is genuinely slower than the fiftieth. Routings written at introduction carry launch times permanently.

Material and design changes shift the work. A gauge change or a tolerance revision alters the operation and rarely triggers a routing review.

The consequence is that errors run in both directions at once, which is why the average looks fine. A business can have a median variance close to a hundred percent while over-running badly on a third of its parts and over-quoting on another third. Looking only at the average hides both.

Free process plan template: the routing to copy

Copy from here. One routing per part or service item.

Header. Part or item number and revision. Description. Routing number and revision. Effective date. Author. Last verified date, meaning when somebody last compared this to actual performance. Quantity basis, meaning the batch size these times assume.

Per operation row:

Operation number, in increments of ten so operations can be inserted without renumbering everything.

Operation description, one line, verb first.

Work centre or machine, by identifier rather than by name.

Setup time, and whether it is per batch or per changeover.

Run time per unit, with the unit stated.

Labour grade or skill required, where it affects cost or scheduling.

Tooling and fixtures, by identifier.

Material or component consumed at this operation.

Inspection or check, cross-referenced to the control plan rather than restated here.

Reference documents, meaning the drawing, the work instruction and any specification.

Actual to routed variance, populated from booked time, which is the column most routings lack.

Copy to here. Two conventions save a great deal of trouble later. Number operations in tens. And state the batch size the setup and run times assume, because a routing without a quantity basis produces nonsense the first time somebody quotes a different volume.

What goes in a process plan for a service operation

The same structure works outside manufacturing and the vocabulary changes.

Operations become process steps. Work centres become teams or roles. Setup time becomes preparation or context-switching time, which service operations routinely ignore and which is frequently larger than the work itself. Run time becomes handling time per case. Tooling becomes systems and access.

Two additions are worth making for service work.

Wait time between steps, which in most service processes exceeds handling time by a wide margin and is invisible if you only record touch time. A case that takes forty minutes of work and eleven days of elapsed time has a problem the handling times will never show.

Rework rate per step, meaning the proportion of cases that come back to this step. Manufacturing routings capture scrap; service routings almost never capture rework, and it is the same number doing the same job.

The commercial logic is identical. If you price professional services, support contracts or processing work by volume, your handling times are your cost base, and they drift for the same reasons.

The fabricator quoting from four year old routings

Hallamshire Fabrications does sheet metal fabrication and assembly, about a hundred and twenty staff, high mix and low volume. Everything is quoted from routings.

A contract won on price came in below expected margin, which prompted somebody to check.

They took the forty highest volume part numbers and compared routed times against booked times over six months.

The median actual was a hundred and eighteen percent of routed time, which on its own suggested a modest under-estimate. The distribution told a different story.

Eleven of the forty were within ten percent either way. Seventeen were between fifteen and forty five percent over. Twelve were between ten and thirty percent under.

The over-runs clustered around operations that had been added and never routed. A deburring step introduced in 2022 after a customer complaint. An additional inspection added in 2023. Both were performed on every part and neither appeared on any routing, so neither had ever been quoted.

The under-runs clustered on a family where a newer machine had roughly halved a cycle time three years earlier. The routings still carried the old machine's times, so the business was quoting about thirty percent high on parts it could have made profitably at a lower price.

On the contract that started the investigation, unrecovered time came to around sixty one thousand pounds over fourteen months. Separately, a review of lost bids suggested a meaningful share had been lost on price for parts the routings were over-costing.

The root cause was ownership. Routings were created at part introduction by a process engineer and had no review trigger of any kind. The average age of a routing in the system was four point two years, and nobody was accountable for any of them after sign-off.

Three changes followed. A last verified date and a variance column were added to the routing format. A monthly report compared booked time against routed time by operation, flagging anything outside fifteen percent across ten or more jobs. And any process change, meaning a new operation, machine or tooling, required the routing to be updated within the same change record rather than as a follow-up task.

They reviewed the worst forty first.

Twelve months later the median actual to routed figure was a hundred and four percent, parts within ten percent had gone from eleven of forty to twenty nine, and the quote win rate on the reviewed families was up about six percentage points.

How to create a process plan, step by step

Start from the drawing or the service specification and the volume. Times mean nothing without a stated batch size or case volume.

List the operations in sequence, at the level of granularity your planning system uses. Too fine and it becomes unmaintainable; too coarse and you cannot see where time goes.

Assign each operation to a work centre or role, by identifier.

Estimate setup and run times, and record where each number came from. An estimate marked as an estimate gets revisited. An estimate presented as a standard does not.

Add tooling, materials and inspection points, referencing the control plan rather than duplicating it.

Cross-reference the work instruction for each operation, so the routing says what happens and the instruction says how, which our manufacturing work instructions template covers.

Then run it against a real job and compare. First routings are always wrong somewhere, and the first job is the cheapest opportunity to find out.

How to keep routed times honest against actuals

This is the part that separates a routing system that works from one that quietly costs money.

Compare booked to routed monthly, by operation rather than by part, because a systematic variance usually belongs to a work centre rather than to a product.

Set a variance threshold and a job count, so you react to patterns rather than to single jobs. Fifteen percent across ten jobs is a reasonable starting point.

Investigate both directions. Over-runs get attention because they hurt margin. Under-runs are quietly worse, because they cost you work you never knew you lost.

Tie routing updates to change control. Any new operation, machine or tooling change updates the routing in the same change record. Not as a follow-up, because follow-ups do not happen.

Put a last verified date on every routing and report the ageing. A list of routings over three years old with no verification is a list of your least reliable numbers.

Where the routing changes because somebody improved the method, that improvement is worth recording properly, and our process improvement plan template covers the transition.

Process plan or project plan: which are you writing?

A project plan covers work with a start, an end and a deliverable. It is written once for that piece of work and closed when the work is done.

A process plan covers work that repeats. It describes how each instance will be produced, and it stays live for as long as the item is made or the service is delivered.

The practical test is whether you would write another one for the next instance. If yes, you want a project plan. If the same document serves every instance, you want a process plan.

Confusing them produces two familiar failures. Treating a repeating process as a project means writing the same plan repeatedly and never accumulating standard times. Treating a project as a process means assuming an established routing exists for work nobody has done before, which is how first article and prototype work gets badly under-quoted.

Process plan, process map or process documentation?

Three related documents at different altitudes.

A process plan is quantitative. Operations, work centres, times, materials. Its readers are planning, costing and scheduling.

A process map or flow is visual. Sequence and decision points. Its reader is somebody trying to understand or improve the shape of the work, and our process flow template covers when drawing one is worth the effort.

Process documentation is instructional. It describes how the work is performed so somebody can do it, and our process documentation template covers it.

Most operations need all three and they should reference each other rather than repeat. The routing says operation twenty runs on machine four for eleven minutes. The work instruction says how to run it. The map shows where operation twenty sits in the flow. When the same content appears in two of them, they diverge within a year.

Can I get a process plan template in Excel or Word?

Excel, without much doubt. A routing is a table with calculated columns: total operation time from setup and run, batch cost from time and rate, and a variance column comparing booked to routed. All of that wants formulas, and the analysis in the worked example above is a pivot rather than a project.

Build one sheet per part or item with a header block above the operation table, plus a summary sheet listing every routing with its last verified date and current variance. That summary is what turns a folder of routings into something anybody manages.

Word suits only the surrounding procedure: how routings are created, approved and revised in your organisation, which belongs with your policy documents rather than with the routings.

PowerPoint has no useful role here beyond presenting the variance analysis, and PDF suits the issued routing sent with a job packet, exported from the live workbook with its revision stamped on it.

Most businesses past a certain size run routings inside an ERP or MRP system rather than in spreadsheets, and the same maintenance problem applies there with one difference: the system makes the times harder to see and therefore easier to leave alone.

How to keep the plan and the method in step

A routing says operation twenty takes eleven minutes. Whether it actually takes eleven minutes depends on how the operation is performed, which lives in a different document that changes on a different schedule.

When somebody finds a faster way, two things should happen: the work instruction is updated so everyone uses it, and the routing is updated so the business quotes it. In practice neither happens, because updating the instruction means re-photographing a setup and rewriting steps for a job the author already knows how to do.

Trupeer AI removes most of that cost. The person who performs the operation records it once, and the output is a written instruction with the steps and images already captured, ready to check rather than rebuild. The routing update then has something concrete attached to it rather than being a number somebody changed.

Record it. Brand it. Translate it. Trupeer it.

Where a plant runs several first languages, one recording produces the instruction in each, which is usually where multilingual sites give up. The manual creator covers longer operating documents, the SOP creator covers the procedures behind the operations, and the output lives in your knowledge base in consistent branding. Setup instructions are in the document template setup guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a free process plan template in Excel?

Excel is the right format and the routing structure above builds directly into a sheet. There is no gated download and no form. The two columns worth adding to whatever you already use are last verified date and actual to routed variance, since those are what stop the times drifting unnoticed.

Is there a free process plan template in Word?

Word suits the procedure governing how routings are created and revised rather than the routings themselves. A routing in Word cannot calculate total operation time or variance, and it becomes unmanageable once you have more than a handful of part numbers.

Is there a free process plan template in PowerPoint?

Not usefully for the plan itself. Slides are the right place for the variance analysis when you present it, which is worth doing, because a chart showing a third of parts over-running and a third over-quoted makes the case for maintenance better than any argument.

Is there a free process plan template in PDF?

Export the issued routing to PDF for the job packet, stamped with its revision, and keep the source editable. A routing that exists only as a PDF is one nobody can compare against actuals, which is the entire point of maintaining it.

What is the best free process plan template?

The one with a last verified date and a variance column. Every free routing template offers operations, work centres and times, which is the easy part. What determines whether the document stays true is whether anything in it prompts somebody to check it against reality.

Who should own the process plan?

Manufacturing or process engineering creates it, and somebody in operations or finance should own the ongoing accuracy, because the consequences of drift are commercial rather than technical. Routings owned only by engineering get created well and maintained rarely, since nobody in engineering feels the margin.

How often should a process plan be reviewed?

On triggers plus a rolling cycle. Triggers are any new operation, machine, tooling or design change, handled in the same change record. The rolling cycle should be driven by the variance report rather than by a calendar, working through whatever is furthest outside tolerance. Anything unverified for three years is worth checking regardless.

What is process planning in manufacturing?

The engineering discipline of deciding how a designed part will actually be made: which operations, in what sequence, on which machines, with what tooling and at what times. The output is the process plan or routing. It sits between design and production and it is where manufacturability, cost and lead time are effectively determined, long before anything is scheduled.