Understanding quality and seeking to improve it is arguably the core purpose behind undertaking process improvements. Hence the creation of the Deming cycle.

But where did this philosophy of process improvement come from?

One key person is William Edwards Deming – sometimes referred to as Edward W. Deming. He’s principally a statistician, but one could even call him a philosopher of science.

Deming’s goal was to reapply the scientific method to business processes, and has left us with two main variants of his thinking: PDSA and PDCA.

In this article we’ll outline:

• What the Deming cycle is, with its history
• How to apply the Deming cycle to improve your business processes
• The important distinction between PDSA and PDCA
• How PDSA is employed in the medical field

Deming’s approach is not just about improving processes, but about improving a whole business.

In a recent meta-study from the British Medical Journal, researchers found only 2 out of 73 studies had applied PDSA in a way which fully met criteria. Commenting:

To progress the development of the science of improvement, a greater understanding of the use of improvement methods, including PDSA, is essential to draw reliable conclusions about their effectiveness.

And that’s why we’re writing this article!

All businesses need a safety inspection.

And the humble safety inspector is one of the forgotten heroes of our modern age.

I know, I know, you get it all the time. People must be buying you drinks non-stop.

In the UK, for instance, there has been an 84% decrease in the number of fatal injuries by employees at work.

In 1974, Britain saw almost 700 people die at work. Now only around 100 die each year at work. That’s about 600 fewer deaths.

Map that back to 1974 and account for a fairly consistent downward trend and we can determine that about 13,500 people didn’t die thanks to improved workplace safety. And that’s just the UK!

Those lives are on you, safety inspectors.

To show our appreciation, we’re providing a whole bunch of safety inspection checklists – from the ones you expect to the ones you don’t.

In this Process Street article, we’re gonna cover:

• What is a safety inspection?
• Why use a safety inspection checklist?
• Over 40 safety inspection checklists to use today
• How to use Process Street for safety inspections

Continue Reading

Andy Mura is an inbound Marketer, entrepreneur, speaker, and SaaS enthusiast currently working in Germany as the Head of Marketing at Userlane, the user onboarding and support automation platform that drives customer success.

The modern B2B SaaS market is reaching full maturity.

After attracting early adaptors and transforming the startup world, SaaS has conquered the enterprise world as well. Large corporations, such as Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP, have shifted their focus from stationary, on-premise software to subscription-based cloud solutions.

And in turn, even the most conservative enterprises are rethinking their infrastructure to leverage the flexibility and reliability of modern SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions.

Companies will soon run solely on SaaS applications. In fact, there are many reasons that lead firms to embrace this new model.

In this Process Street article we’ll cover:

• Why are B2B SaaS applications on the rise?
• The 9 essential elements of B2B SaaS applications
• The growing world of B2B SaaS applications

Continue Reading

What is Genchi Genbutsu? It’s part of the Toyota Production System conceptual toolkit. And it works.

It’s one thing to identify errors or weaknesses in your business, but it’s another to actually fix and improve them.

The crucial step in fixing an error is deciding the right solution to implement. Pick the wrong one and you create a different problem.

When you’re in a massive company, you want to make sure you’re picking the right solution before you start implementing across a whole corporate structure.

Because of this, investigating the problem as thoroughly as possible should be paramount. And this leads us to Genchi Genbutsu.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to look at:

• What is Genchi Genbutsu?
• How Toyota revitalized their minivan thanks to a road trip
• 3 academic approaches to guide your investigation

Continue Reading

Are you in need of some workflow examples to make your teams smarter?

But what makes a team smart?

Several things do, but powerful workflows are one critical ingredient which makes teams smart.

Teams that use workflows don’t set goals and simply hope to reach them; they create checklists (workflows) to make sure they reach their goals.

No wonder 50% of businesses that use workflow management systems say the results are substantial.

It’s incredible.

Teams that use workflows are super organized and able to perform daunting tasks — no matter the long processes involved.

But what types of workflows should you be using this year?

It’s different for every organization; workflow systems are not always one-size-fits-all. But these nine Process Street workflow examples should give you inspiration for how you can build important systems to run your business with.

Our workflow examples:

1. Employee onboarding workflow
2. Customer support workflows
3. Customer onboarding workflows
4. Content marketing or writing workflows
5. Podcast publishing workflows
6. Request and approval workflows
7. Travel workflows
8. Content promotion workflow
9. Standup meeting workflows

Continue Reading

Overlooking task automation is losing you money

According to Harvard Business Review, marketing executives are losing 10-15% of their time due to not automating simple tasks.

Task automation should already be saving you huge amounts of time and effort.

If it’s not, I can only assume that’s because you’re not using it!

If you’re a heavy user of different SaaS platforms, you’ve probably grown tired of having to jump back and forth from one to another to perform simple tasks.

Would it not be easier if you could click one button and the different platforms just spoke to each other and got the job done for you?

Yes, it obviously would be.

In fact, according to Chui, Manyika, and Miremadi writing in the Harvard Business Review, not only could a marketing executive be automating activities which account for between 10-15% of their current time using existing technology, but for 60% of existing US jobs, 30% of their time could be reduced by automation.

You can read the full report, Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation, at McKinsey.

Note, that this important study is already over a year old, and the speed of technological advancements in available automation software has likely caused those given percentages to rise even further.

Task automation is where you doing one task results in multiple tasks being done. Bit of a mouthful, but let me give an example…

Or, if you want to watch a step by step example, check out this Process Street video about automating client onboarding.

Continue Reading

Greek philosophers can teach us a great deal. Let’s, for example, take this quote:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana

Big George, originally Jorge, makes a valid point with this one. The quote is often used to talk about giant historical shifts or wars or something similar. Yet, it’s equally true of smaller things.

In business, as in life, someone has already come before you and done the same thing. These people have failed, learned, and then improved. We, in the future, are in the fortunate position of being able to learn from their failures and successes if we choose to.

And this is why we choose to bang on about the past so much. Whether it be recent history like The History of SaaS, 20th Century history like How Does a Franchise Work?, further back like The History of Surgical Processes, or even further back to the beginnings of civilization like How Were The Pyramids Built?, we often like to take lessons from the past.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to ancient Greece to check out 9 key philosophers and see what business lessons we can take from their lives and work.

Continue Reading

This is a guest post from Oren Greenberg, a growth marketer and founder of the Kurve consultancy in London. He helps startups and corporate innovation projects scale using digital channels. He has written for leading marketing blogs and has been featured in the international press.

A business is an abstract entity, which is brought to life by its people. Every team member has a part to play in representing their organization – not in the sense of blindly flying the flag or sacrificing their own identity, but in the sense of owning their area of expertise and sharing their deepest knowledge.

These days, it’s normal for a business leader to build their own personal brand. These are the “thought-leaders” we hear about so often. But I believe that too many organizations stop here, and miss the chance to create a team of people who all have strong personal brands.

In turn, I believe this limits the opportunity to build credibility, reliability, and authority – three of the key considerations for B2B buyers.

So, the tactics I discuss in this Process Street article are designed to apply to team members at every level of the hierarchy. They are suitable for business leaders, but also for executives and junior staff.

Continue Reading

Marketing your product to a wide audience is a real challenge for many businesses. Acquisition costs can be high and effective optimization of approach requires bucketloads of data.

According to research from Aberdeen Group, users of marketing automation software are 17 times more likely to track all their data than those who don’t employ these platforms. This drives improvement and is one of the primary reasons that users of marketing automation decrease customer acquisition costs year on year at over twice the rate of their competition.

Modern marketing methods mean that multiple in-depth campaigns can be run without all the unnecessary administration and time-consuming efforts of the past.

There are many automation tools to choose from on the market and in this article we’ll run through 10 of the best, giving you a breakdown of what each offers.

Continue Reading

British Airways chief executive described the incident as “catastrophic” as 800 flights were canceled and 75,000 travelers were affected.

Flight compensation website flightright.com estimated that British Airways would have to pay around €61m to passengers for refunds alone under EU legislation. Add to this the cost of reimbursing angry passengers for unexpected hotel stays and other inconveniences, and the total financial damage to British Airways has been estimated at £100m.

Why? Someone turned their data center off and on again.

The entire airline was down for almost 2 days. This wasn’t a natural disaster, it was a process failure.

In this article, we’ll explore how to spot process failures before they occur using a system called Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). We’ll assess an overview and then delve in deeper to ground our understanding and include a premade Process Street FMEA template to help you run your own assessments in future.

In this article we’ll cover:

• Your free FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) template
• FMEA? What is Failure Mode and Effects Analysis?
• When do we use FMEA?
• Conducting and documenting Failure Mode and Effect Analysis: A user’s guide
• What happened to British Airways?
• Why did it happen?
• How can FMEA help us prevent this happening again?