Great question, Chris. I had a similar problem at a previous job when I was responsible for writing and updating SOP’s as well.
One problem that I often came across was including troubleshooting instructions in an SOP. As I am sure you can imagine, describing common errors and sounds that can occur while operating was not easy and including instructions for everything that can go wrong was even more difficult. What I would often do to amend this was to include the instruction manual as an official reference document and reference it in the SOP that I was writing for further and advanced troubleshooting. This shortened the SOP drastically, while also including (or having access to) all of the necessary information to correctly operate the machine or technique.