To the lay person there is no difference. To the partially informed it is a convenient differentiation in an attempt de-value a document when found by an auditor. To the truly expert, any document that has been generated to describe a process, no matter the detail, the prescription, the intent, should be judged by the end-user and subsequently reviewed for accessibility, relevancy and most importantly impact on the total system. But enough pontificating.
What is the difference and when should you have one, the other or both? Once again, the situation is totally up to you, the client organisation and the end users. By definition, documentation within a quality management system is broadly broken into a number of categories. These being; vision, policy, procedure, instruction. The structure and format can be determined by the company and or end users with the intent being; vision - overall strategy, policy - a business rule or ideology as a subset of vision, procedure - what has to be done to achieve policy, instructions - the minutia to comply with procedure.
The standard only requires six documented procedures and requires records to be generated to verify fifteen processes and does not stipulate anywhere any requirements for additional documentation. That is left completely up to the need of the organisation and normally as a consequence of risk management. That means if you want a work instruction to explain in detail or to prescribe strict process, use them. The format is up to you. Screen shots, pictograms, photos, it is totally up to you. Just make sure that if they are to be valued that you apply the same document control measures for them as you do for all your quality management system documents and then use them in training sessions and include them in internal quality audits.
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