Develop Bench Aids for all relevant pieces of equipment. These are stepwise procedures for routine use of the piece of equipment; they contain the procedure for operating the piece of equipment and, if necessary, the basic preventive maintenance steps and calibration procedure that needs to be carried out regularly. Procedures that need to be carried out once in a while (preventive maintenance/calibration) don't have to be included in these Bench Aids. For this the user/person responsible for the piece of equipment/Equipment Officer can use the SOP.

See the example bench aid for operating a centrifuge provided in the right-hand column.

Highly important: make the Bench Aids part of the SOPs: include the Bench Aids as appendixes to the SOPs (hence: the SOP version number must be printed on the bench aid as well). Every time an SOP is revised, the old bench aid needs to be revised and replaced by the new one. As the version number of the SOP is shown on the bench aid, you can easily check if the bench aid is still in accordance with the SOP.