How Yokohama Tire built process adherence its leaders can actually see

Almost every distribution network has SOPs. They live in a binder, a SharePoint folder, or an LMS. They were written carefully. They were signed off on. They are, by any reasonable definition, done.

And they tell you almost nothing about what is happening on your floor right now.

That gap — between the process as written and the process as performed — is where inventory accuracy, service levels, safety, and cost quietly get decided. In a recent webinar, Austin Boal, Director of Operations at Yokohama Tire, named it in a single line:

“A documented SOP is not the same as an executed SOP.”

Here is how his team closed that gap, and what other operators can take from it.

Stage one: don’t rewrite anything yet

Boal came into the Director of Operations role already knowing the Yokohama network intimately. Sixteen years in supply chain and logistics — starting as a data analyst, later running Yokohama’s transportation network, then global logistics and warehousing for a manufacturing company before returning to lead the DCs. He arrived with a list.

“I had big ideas in what I wanted to do day one. Get in there, change that SOP piece, create these new shiny KPIs, boom, boom, boom. But change too quickly, I learned, loses people.”

So he did the opposite. The network was mid-transition to a new warehouse management system, several things were moving at once, and — critically — the operation was performing. Labor budget was being met. Headcount was where it needed to be.

“If it’s not broken, don’t tear it up and bring the team through a very dramatic, unnecessary change.”

Stage one was time on the floor. Watching operators work. Collecting their feedback. Understanding what the process actually felt like to the person executing it, before touching a single document.

That is not a soft step. It is what makes every later step credible. As Boal describes it, the feedback runs both directions — sometimes leadership brings a problem to the floor, and sometimes it is the other way, with an operator saying I’m doing this part of the process and it just doesn’t make sense to me.

The takeaway for operators: unless the issue is safety or quality, resist the urge to redesign on day one. Earn the right to change the process by first proving you understand it.

Stage two: make the standard observable

The new WMS came with new SOPs, and those SOPs had a specific weakness: they were RF-based. Go to this screen. Click this button. Effectively a script.

“The operator didn’t necessarily know why they were doing what they were doing. Just, this is what you follow.”

What the screen instructions could not capture was everything physical and everything safety-related. What a finished pallet of tires should look like. Whether the label is facing out. Whether the UOM on the pallet is right. Whether the operator’s safety belt is applied on the forklift. And critically — what to do when something goes wrong.

“If they end up clicking the wrong button, there was no SOP to say go back to this screen or do that… So the biggest disconnect was, you have a written process that should be executed, but it was missing steps. I don’t think we were getting our operators the best opportunity to be successful.”

So Yokohama started running structured observations in Smart Access — and used what those observations surfaced to rebuild the SOPs. The new versions mirror the RF flow and the physical movement of the pallet and the safety checks, with photos of what “right” looks like.

That is the real shift. A useful SOP does not tell someone what button to click. It tells them what good work looks like. That is the difference between an SOP as a document and an SOP as an operating standard.

And it changes what leadership can do:

“If the standard can’t be observed, it’s really hard to coach. And if it can’t be coached, it can’t be scaled.” — John White, Smart Access

Stage three: adherence, then KPIs

Only once the standard was right and observable did Yokohama layer on adherence measurement and process-level KPIs.

“When you have the correct SOP and you’re observing it and you’re having those coaching conversations, you can really at that point get into meaningful adherence and KPIs based on what that process is.”

Order matters here. Most networks run this backwards — they set the KPI first, watch it move, and then try to reverse-engineer why. Boal’s framing is that a metric can tell you the result but not the reason.

“A normal dashboard can tell you how something is operating… but it can’t tell you why the result is the result. The observation is going to give you better insight as to why the result is the result, not just the result.”

What this unlocked

Coaching got faster, and therefore useful. Before, a process problem surfaced days or weeks after the fact — a pallet in the wrong location, found long after the transaction. By then, coaching the operator meant reconstructing what happened, and the moment had lost all its meaning. Now the conversation happens close to the work.

“The faster that you can solve the problem, the less you are bleeding between those two periods.”

Onboarding and cross-training compressed. Existing operators with 25 or 30 years at Yokohama do not need the SOP; they know the work cold. The gain is with new hires and cross-trained associates, who can now pull the full standard up on an iPad, a phone, or the RF while they are doing the job — instead of carrying a printout that may already be out of date.

“What we might have thought is like a 30, 60, 90 has drastically changed based on our ability to ramp them up with the tools that we have.”

Scale stopped meaning starting over. Adding a building, a shift, or an operation now starts from a blueprint: a defined process, an observation cadence, a coaching loop, and a way to measure it.

“We’re never starting from scratch, even if it’s a new process.”

The question worth asking

Your SOPs exist. The harder question is the one Yokohama started with: can your leaders see where execution follows the standard, where it is starting to drift, and where a team needs support — before it shows up in the numbers?

If the answer relies on a supervisor remembering, a spreadsheet being rolled up, or a problem surfacing on its own, the standard is documented but not executed.

Watch the full session. Talk to our team about how Smart Access connects standards, observations, coaching, and performance across your network.