It’s an accepted reality of business that customers come and go.

This is why we’re always on the lookout for new customers – we know we can’t just rely on the existing ones to keep things ticking over.

Yet, we don’t have to accept this fact lying down. And many don’t!

This article is about fighting back against those customers abandoning ship; about stemming the tide of the churn.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What is churn management?
• What are the different types of churn?
• How the telecom industry pioneered churn management
• The 4 best practices across telecom’s big players
• The 3 critical steps to implementing best practices
• The Harvard trick to boosting profits by 115%

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Automation is all the rage right now.

We at Process Street can’t stop going on about it.

Automation can save time and money while taking the monotonous tasks out of your employees’ days.

It’s a win-win.

But, in order to approach automation properly, it’s best to understand the development of automation over time and what best practices are used in order to deliver effective automations in your business.

That’s why this Process Street article will look at the core Toyota principle of Jidoka, including:

• What is Jidoka?
• What are the related concepts within the Toyota Production System?
• 3 examples of Jidoka in practice

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If you want to employ approaches like business process management in your business it’s best to have a solid understanding of how these theories work.

One crucial aspect of using these theories correctly is understanding their development.

It’s common for managers to want to employ cutting edge ideas in their business, but without a deep understanding these methods can be misapplied.

These errors will reduce the effectiveness of your process management and hold your business back.

It’s not just business where process improvement efforts are regularly being undermined! In a recent meta-study from the British Medical Journal, researchers found only 2 out of 73 studies had applied the PDSA process improvement methodology 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.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to look at some of the fundamentals and pick out key historical thinkers whose work we can trace from in order to better inform how process improvement methods should be done. Including:

• Who is Frederick Winslow Taylor?
• What is Taylorism?
• What W. Edwards Deming can teach us about continuous improvement
• Why Taiichi Ohno helps you cut waste in your business
• What Ludwig von Bertalanffy tells us about systems
• How Bill Smith changed the way we view defects
• What Ray Dalio can show us about company culture

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Whether you’re submitting a draft of an article for review, collating a report for senior management, or presenting a product design, you probably need someone to sign off on your work.

This happens day in day out in organizations all around the world.

Yet, the sign off process can be slow and littered with delays.

Anyone who has worked in software development will know the pain of submitting work for review, only for revisions and changes to drone on and on. The time spent waiting can sometimes be as much as the time spent working.

And this, friends, is bad for business.

Last week I published an article on Muda – waste in production systems – and laid out the different ways poor processes create waste and damage business performance. One of those wastes is referred to as Time on Hand, or waiting.

In this article, we’ll look to cover the most common occurrence of this waste: the approval flow. We’ll look at:

• What an approval process is
• What common approval workflows are
• Best practices for approvals
• How you can use Process Street to streamline your approvals

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TechMD is an award-winning IT solutions firm specializing in strategic consulting and managed services. To help TechMD manage cybersecurity operations and client workloads, the company turned to Process Street to facilitate the necessary process management efforts.

We spoke with company President Sebastian Igreti about TechMD’s experience of Process Street.

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In our increasingly mobile-first world, we’ve come to rely on getting business done on the phone much more than ever before.

The difficulties of efficiently managing email on a smartphone has likely been a major factor for the rise in team communication software like Slack.

However, it doesn’t need to be this way. And we can’t let it be this way.

That’s why this Process Street article is dedicated to exploring the different email apps for iPhone in order to find which ones have which strengths, and to crown an overall winner.

The apps will be judged primarily on how well they achieve their intended aims, with depth of features and ease of use affecting their scores from that base. I’m going to try not to consider price while calculating a score, but I will mention pricing where relevant.

You can check out the quick overview of scores below and the full breakdowns app by app through the rest of the article.

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After Elon Musk’s successes sending Falcon Heavy into space with his Roadster attached, the fanfare around his achievements has reached new highs.

But not everything is rosy for Musk.

Tesla is struggling. It’s not hitting its production targets for the Model 3, and this is not for the first time.

The goal for Tesla has been to hit 5,000 units per week and though Musk is confident of reaching that figure the Model 3 production has been mired by continually failing to meet demand.

It’s not enough just to have a good product, you also need to have high performing production systems in place to take that product effectively to market.

In this Process Street article, we’ll tackle the machine which builds the machine and we’re going to look at:

• What a production system is and what a good one looks like
• The production system of the future and how Elon Musk wants to build it
• Why a production system isn’t just for manufacturing
• How you can build production systems for your business
• Why Tesla’s Gigafactory is Musk’s most ambitious project yet

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When it comes to hiring staff you’ll go through multiple important stages to vet the candidates and make sure you choose the right one.

For many managers, the interview is the most important step.

The interview allows you to ask questions and interact with the other person; verify their claims, test their knowledge, and start to figure out whether you would be happy working with them in future. This allows you to go beyond simply the information on a CV.

As Ray Dalio, founder and CEO of Bridgewater Associates, phrased it:

Weigh values and abilities more heavily than skills in deciding whom to hire.

Knowing about the human sat in front of you is crucial to a successful hire.

In this article, we’re going to give you a selection of Process Street templates which should help the whole process run smoothly:

• Key tips on how to conduct an interview
• 5 interview processes with questions
• How to connect a job application form to Zapier to automate your hiring
• 5 hiring processes to cover everything else

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The franchise model of doing business is a decidedly American affair.

The concept marries the power and scale efficiencies of large corporate bodies with the entrepreneurialism and hard work of mom-and-pop small business.

According to the United States International Trade Association:

there are over 780,000 franchise businesses that directly employ over 8.8 million people and account for over $890 billion in direct economic output.

The franchise model is one of the powerhouses of the US economy and features countless household names – McDonald’s being one of its truly global successes.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What a franchise is, and the costs associated with starting one
• What the 2016 film The Founder tells us about the origin story of McDonald’s
• The role the Founding Fathers played in the history of franchises
• What systems McDonald’s used to propel their franchised successes

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Some people seem like naturals when it comes to sales. Their smooth talking and deep product knowledge entices customers and makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Source

A high performing sales person is a huge asset to a company, and they’re often paid very well as a reward!

• Maybe you want to start a new business and need to jump into the sales role to get your fledgling startup off the ground?
• Maybe you want to build a sales team to crush sales goals while you focus on your specialty?
• Or maybe you just want to get into sales as a career and need to know how to get up to speed fast?

Well, in this Process Street article we’ll cover solutions to each of these conundrums. We’ll look at:

1. How Salesforce hit their sales goals
2. 10 top tips the sales experts have for a beginner
3. How Close.io CEO Steli Efti builds outbound sales teams
4. What steps you need to take to build sales processes (with a load of premade templates to help you get started!)

“A goal properly set is halfway reached.” – Legendary sales guru, Zig Ziglar.

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