Consulting & Technology · SOP development · Industrial rubber · Mumbai
Twenty SOPs rebuilt, two going live a week.
The short version
Zenith Rubber has made industrial rubber since 1965 — rubber sheets, wear-resistant rubber for mining, flooring, EPDM waterproofing, coated fabrics and inflatables. It is family-owned, works across India and the Middle East, and runs its head office at Nariman Point with factories in Dombivli and Ras Al Khaimah. Debox has worked with Zenith since October 2024, across growth planning, procurement and organisation design.
This case study picks up where the performance management work paused. The KPIs were sound, but the data behind them was missing or wrong. That was not a reporting problem. It was a process problem: where work was not clearly defined, it was not recorded either.
So from April 2026 we rebuilt Zenith’s SOPs department by department, with each team. We started with Quality, reviewed and rewrote the Purchase SOPs from 2025, moved on to EXIM, and are now working on Production Planning. More than twenty SOPs have been written or rebuilt. Writing them raised the next question — how do you know a step was actually followed? That question led to 100 Ops.
Clean data comes from a clear process
When a KPI has no data behind it, the instinct is to build a better report. But a report can only show what was recorded, and work is only recorded reliably when everyone agrees what the work is: the steps, who owns each one, and what counts as done.
At Zenith, much of that lived in people’s heads or in documents nobody opened. Some processes were captured in Microsoft Business Central, but many were long and complicated there. Quality check data was hard to track, and so were holds and dispositions on material. Teams worked around the system rather than through it, and the data never arrived.
Fix the process, and the data follows. Build a better report on top of a vague process and you get a tidier version of the same gap.
What we did, step by step
Steps three to six run as one repeatable cycle. That cycle is why SOPs go live in days rather than months.
Department by department
We chose the order by where clean data mattered most and where the process was hardest to see.
One department done well beats ten done on paper.
What got in the way, and how we got past it
A written SOP fixes the process on paper. It does not tell you whether anyone followed it today. As the first Quality SOPs were signed off, the same question came up in every discussion: once this is agreed, how will anyone know each step actually happened, and on time?
Business Central could not answer it well. It records transactions, but the steps between them — a quality check, a hold decision, a complaint investigation — were long and awkward to capture there. A shared folder of documents could not answer it either.
So the SOP discussion became a data tracking discussion, and in July 2026 that became 100 Ops: a way to run each SOP as a live workflow, where every step has an owner, a deadline and a record. Turnaround and service levels are tracked inside each SOP, and a step running late escalates before it becomes a problem rather than after. The build started in August and the first SOP went live in October 2026. It works alongside Business Central rather than replacing it.
An SOP in a folder is a promise. An SOP on a system is a record.
What it produced
How to read this
These results are about coverage, on purpose. The point of this phase is to get the process defined and recorded. Performance numbers come once enough SOPs have run long enough to compare, which is also when the PMS restarts.
Who did what. We led the process walkthroughs, wrote the SOPs and built them on 100 Ops. Zenith’s department heads and teams checked every step, gave feedback and took each SOP live.
Where it stands
At the Dombivli factory, every Quality SOP is live on 100 Ops, and EXIM and Purchase have followed. Daily tasks reach each person through Microsoft Teams and Planner. We are writing the Production Planning SOPs now and continuing the same cycle for each one.
The end goal is every possible SOP at Zenith live by March 2027. When that is done, the performance reviews that paused in December 2025 restart — this time on data the work has already recorded.
Every step owned, every deadline visible, every record kept.
What we now build in from day one
Walk the floor before writing a word. SOPs written from old documents describe how work used to happen. Every SOP now starts with the people who do the work, which is why teams recognise them as their own.
Design every SOP to be tracked. Each one is written with its steps, owners, turnaround times and service levels defined up front, so it can go straight onto the platform instead of being rewritten later.
Go live in small, steady batches. About two a week, each demoed and corrected before rollout, keeps quality high and lets teams adopt one change at a time.
If your reports never quite add up
The problem is rarely the report. Work gets recorded reliably only when everyone agrees what the work is — the steps, who owns each one, and what counts as done. Where that agreement is missing, the data will be too, and no amount of dashboard will fix it.
Start with one department where the data matters most, walk the process with the people who do it, and write the SOP so it can be tracked from the day it is signed off.
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Measurement note. SOP counts, scope, departments live and go-live pace are from our own project records and confirmed with Zenith’s department heads. This phase reports coverage rather than performance: process adherence and KPI outcomes are measurable only once enough SOPs have run long enough to compare, which is when the performance reviews restart.
