Nature's Sunshine Products: governing manufacturing SOPs and policies inside Microsoft 365

By Alexandra Jones, Project and Account Manager

Nature's Sunshine Products is a natural health and nutritional supplements manufacturer based in Lehi, Utah, with around 1,000 employees. Alongside its wider policy library, the business manages the manufacturing SOPs and ISO 9001 documentation that keep a regulated production environment running safely, and its previous platform had stopped being able to support that at scale. We worked with Nature's Sunshine to implement Xoralia, bringing the policy library, attestation, approval workflow and reporting together under one system, and building competency testing directly into the SOPs themselves. More than a year on, the platform is used daily across Manufacturing, Legal, Finance, HR, IT and Quality, with the manufacturing team among its strongest advocates.

When we first spoke with Nature's Sunshine, the pressure wasn't coming from one direction. It was coming from several at once. The team were managing close to 1,000 controlled documents, among them the manufacturing SOPs and ISO 9001 documentation that keep a regulated food production business running safely and legally. Their existing policy platform had become a genuine constraint: costs kept rising, the product itself had stopped moving forward, and it was no longer built for the scale of content Nature's Sunshine needed to manage.

Underneath that, the real issue was governance. As a publicly traded company working to FDA, ISO 9001 and a wide spread of other standards, Nature's Sunshine needed to prove, not just assume, that staff had read and understood the documents that governed how machines were operated and products were made. Annual reviews and approvals needed to move cleanly across multiple departments, each with its own owners and approvers. And because the business operates across multiple sites, there were real questions about who should see which documents, and how to stop a document meant for one location surfacing somewhere it shouldn't.

Auditors needed evidence, not reassurance. Nature's Sunshine needed a system that could show, clearly and quickly, who had reviewed, approved and acknowledged every controlled document in scope, while the previous platform kept running so nothing was lost in the move.

The instinct with a project like this is to start moving documents across. We started somewhere less obvious: with the people who own them.

Before a single SOP or ISO document moved into SharePoint, we worked with Nature's Sunshine to map out who the document owners, approvers and administrators would be across Legal, Manufacturing and IT, alongside the HR and Finance stakeholders who had flagged similar needs earlier in the process. Getting that structure right first meant that when content did move, it moved into a system where responsibility and access were already clear, rather than being worked out after the fact.

With that foundation in place, the team built out Nature's Sunshine's SharePoint document libraries and worked through the practical decisions around metadata and tagging, so that permissions based on role, team and location could be set up properly. A dedicated session on term store, tagging and permissions ran alongside separate Document Owner Training and Workflow Training, so each group learned the part of the system that was actually relevant to them, rather than sitting through one generic walkthrough.

The previous platform stayed live throughout, which meant Nature's Sunshine could migrate content across in a managed way rather than switching everything over in one move.

For Nature's Sunshine, the shift is best measured by how the platform is actually being used, rather than by any single number. The clearest example is competency testing: proving staff understand a procedure, not just that they opened it, something the business could not evidence before Xoralia and now produces as a matter of course. Adoption of Xoralia is complete across the organisation, and the manufacturing team, who arguably had the most to gain from getting this right, say the management of their SOPs is genuinely improved. Several users have described Xoralia as a step up from the platform it replaced.

That matters because the alternative wasn't neutral. Without a governed, auditable way to manage SOPs and policies, Nature's Sunshine would have kept carrying the cost of not being able to show, quickly and confidently, that the right people had read the right documents at the right time, across a regulatory footprint that now spans ISO 9001, the safety management standard it's now pursuing, and obligations from Sarbanes-Oxley to international regulators such as Australia's TGA. Instead, the business has a governance model with clear owners, approvers and administrators, a 96.6% attestation rate to point to, and an audit trail that holds up whenever it's asked for.

That partnership continues past go live: our team and Nature's Sunshine continue to meet to review how the platform is being used and where it can go next.

You can see more of Xoralia's features in action on our screenshots page if you'd like a closer look at how these features actually appear on screen.