As I stood, staring at my big toe which had somehow poked its way through a layer of polyester, it occurred to me that:

1. These 2-month-old running shoes definitely needed to be disposed of.
2. I will not be buying from this poor quality brand again.

In this scenario, I had fallen victim to poor quality control measures.

Purchasing a pair of running shoes not robust enough to meet my needs meant I, as a consumer, was not satisfied and did not repeat my custom with the given brand.

This reaction is to be expected.

A study by Psomas et al, detailed on Emerald Insights, concluded that effective quality control measures, in the form of Quality Management Systems (QMS systems), directly improve employee benefits, business performance, and customer satisfaction.

“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives” – William A Foster, Forbes Quotes

In this Process Street article, we take a look at what quality control is, and how you can implement effective quality control processes in your business today.

You will be presented with 19 free templates, ready and waiting to be used right away. These templates will help you build and audit your QMS systems, to meet the needs of key stakeholders in your business.

1. ISO 9001:2015 Internal Audit Checklist for Quality Management Systems
2. Financial Audit Checklist
3. Environmental Accounting Internal Audit
4. Environmental Management Self Audit Checklist
5. Management Systems Audit Checklist
6. ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 Integrated Management System (IMS) Checklist
7. PPC Audit Checklist
8. Google Analytics Audit
9. Technical SEO Audit
10. UX Audit
11. ISO 27001 Information Security Management System (ISO27K ISMS) Audit Checklist
12. SQL Server Audit Checklist
13. Firewall Audit Checklist
14. Network Security Audit Checklist
15. ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Audit Checklist
16. Diversity Management Monthly Audit
17. Hotel Sustainability Audit
18. Laboratory Safety Procedure Audit
19. Retail Store Audit Checklist

Sound good?

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to that section, alternatively, scroll down to read all I have to say.

• What is quality control?
• Create your quality control systems in Process Street
• Audits: What are they and why they are needed for quality control
• Audit processes: Incorporating audit processes into a QMS

Let’s begin!
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This is a guest post by Derek Jones from Deputy, a global workforce management platform for employee scheduling, timesheets, and communication. With a focus on Emerging Retail, Derek helps business owners and workforce leaders simplify employment law compliance, keep labor costs in line, and build award-winning workplaces. Derek has over 16 years’ experience in delivering data-driven sales and marketing strategies to SaaS companies like MarketSource and Griswold Home Care.

One of the many factors that can help guarantee the success and growth of a business today is employee performance.

Most organizations know this. Therefore, they want employees that are as efficient as possible. However, that is easier said than done, especially in industries where activities often run at odd hours or even 24/7.

For such industries (like healthcare, hospitality, and retail in particular), one of the most important things they’ll need to manage is shift work scheduling.

Through optimization, the task of scheduling shift work will have a structure to minimizes employee burnout and improve overall performance.

Employees that work in an enabling environment have a higher chance to properly complete all important tasks – on schedule.

In view of that, in this Process Street article, we will:

• Discuss some of the issues and challenges that surround shift work.
• Take a look at up-to-date research regarding employee performance.
• Summarize 3 shift-work goals you can incorporate to optimize your shift work schedule.
• Give top tips on shift work scheduling to maximize employee productivity and retention.

Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section, alternatively scroll down to read all, and find out how you can optimize your shift work schedules today!

• Schedule optimization: Using BPM in shift work
• Shift work scheduling: The top 3 shift work issues
• How do common shift work issues impact employee performance?
• Schedule optimization: 3 goals to optimize your shift schedule
• Shift work scheduling: Scheduling tips and tricks for shift work

Let’s jump right to it!
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This is a guest post by Angelina harper, a tech writer at Really Simple Systems interested in cloud technology, digital marketing, and ephemeral content. You can find her most beloved articles on her Twitter account.

Thanks to the realization that retaining existing customers is five times less expensive than obtaining new ones, businesses began exploring ways to improve the success rate of their customer interactions. This is termed customer success. What we wanted to find out is: How do you optimize customer success?

To answer this, we turn our attention to SaaS (Software as a Service) tools, begging the question: What are the top SaaS customer success tools out there?

SaaS customer success tools are an integral component of the modern business tech stack. These tools enable a business to understand what their customers want in terms of service, so they can provide it in an automatic fashion via the tool.

Customer success tools generate positive customer experiences at scale. SaaS companies often need to scale their customer success operations, and their software solutions should reflect this.

With that being said, customer success is a relatively new concept, and many businesses are still learning how to tackle it effectively.

In this Process Street article, we will present you with our top 5 customer success SaaS tools. But before all of that, let’s find out exactly what customer success is and why it is important:

• What is customer success?
• Customer success best practices
• How to improve your customer success process?
• SaaS tools: The most efficient customer success tools

Let’s get started! Continue Reading

This is a guest post by Bryan Christiansen from Limble CMMS – a modern and easy to use mobile maintenance software. Over the years Bryan evolved from a simple software engineer with a spark of entrepreneurial spirit into a confident leader that manages a whole team of people, moving the maintenance industry forward.

When production is expanding, it’s great news for the business. However, this rapid expansion brings many challenges. Properly preparing for each challenge will be important so that production processes run smoothly.

The maintenance department is no exception. As your operation grows, there will always be some difficulties adjusting to the increased maintenance load. This is where maintenance management as a discipline comes in.

Despite its importance for efficient expansion, a HubSpot survey found only 6% of respondents considered their maintenance department well-established.

Maintenance management looks at the steps you can take to prepare and scale your maintenance capacity.

In this Process Street article, we will present to you our 6 top strategies you can implement for efficient maintenance management.

Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say regarding the topic of maintenance management.

• What is maintenance? The importance of more efficient maintenance processes
• Maintenance management concept #1: Using a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS)
• Maintenance management concept #2: The proactive maintenance approach
• Maintenance management concept #3: Continuous improvements with a DMAIC Process
• Maintenance management concept #4: Cleaning out your deferred maintenance backlog
• Maintenance management concept #5: Setting up proper inventory management practices
• Maintenance management concept #6: Adding resources through hiring
• Use Process Street for the management of your maintenance processes

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LA Creative Technologies uses Process Street to streamline operations, with particular focus on (but not limited to) client onboarding, offboarding, and project management procedures.

With process automation and cloud process documentation solutions, Process Street has allowed LA Creative Technologies to productively, effectively and efficiently manage their remote team, and complex procedures.

We spoke with LA Creative’s Founder and CIO Josh Weiss to find out how they are using Process Street for client onboarding, offboarding and project management. We then opened the floor, accepting questions brought forth by our webinar listeners. Here’s what we found out.

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to find out all Process Street and LA Creative Technologies have to say.

• The LA Creative Technologies story: LA Creative Technologies as a management service provider
• The challenge: Client onboarding and offboarding
• The challenge: Project management
• The results: Client onboarding and offboarding
• The results: Project management
• Question time with LA Creative Technologies

Let’s get started.
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This is a guest post written by Alexis Humphrey. Agency owner turned business coach, Alexis Humphrey is on a mission to help freelancers and agency owners maximize their potential by showing them how they can earn more and work less so they can create a life they love. Connect with her on Linkedin or join her private Facebook group.

Steve Jobs built his empire around one clear principle – simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

In his own words:

“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs, Apple’s Steve Jobs

And Warren Buffet agrees…

What does Buffet look for when he invests in a business?

The answer: Something that is simple and reproducible, like Coca Cola, McDonalds or Gillette. These businesses work like machines – the production process is repeatable, and the output is always the same.

In this Process Street article, you will learn how to fine-tune your service-based business into simple and reproducible processes, building a remote agency machine.

This transformation requires consistency and the consistency of processes. With Process Street, this consistency becomes easily attainable. Learn how to set up Process Street processes and establish a solid ground to build your remote agency machine. A remote agency that works on automation, documented processes and requires very little of your time. A remote agency that brings in money, whilst you lay back sipping pina colada’s on a Brazilian beach.

Sound appealing?

Of course it does.

Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Building a remote agency: Maintaining consistency and documenting recurring tasks
• Building a remote agency: Treating your service as a product
• Building a remote agency: Customized chaos
• Building a remote agency: Repeatable systems
• Building a remote agency: Customized chaos vs repeatable systems
• Building a remote agency: Business processes
• Building a remote agency: Why do business processes matter?
• Building a remote agency: How to get started
• Building a remote agency: Embedding processes in your business
• Building a remote agency: The secret sauce

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The global economic cost of anxiety and depression is $1 trillion per year.

That is a substantial cost to an issue that is predominantly ignored.

1 in 5 adults in the U.S. will experience a mental health issue each year, with 1 in 6.8 people experiencing mental health problems in the workplace on a weekly timescale.

Work anxiety is one such mental health condition which evokes a sizable economic cost from lowered employee wellbeing and sick leave.

In this Process Street article we explain what work anxiety is – and in that sense, anxiety in general. We then provide information on how you can take action on anxiety from a personal level and at a company-wide level.

Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down and read all we have to say.

• Work anxiety: Mental Health Risk Assessment
• Work Anxiety: Anxious meaning
• Anxiety explained: Understanding anxiety and the biological causes
• Work anxiety: Take action on anxiety, what you can do as an individual
• Work anxiety: Take action on anxiety, what you can do as a company
• Work anxiety: Take action with Process Street

Capes at the ready, let’s conquer workplace anxiety!
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This is a guest post by Kristen McCabe, a global marketer. She has marketing experience extending from Australia to Chicago with expertise in both B2B and B2C industries, specializing in content, SEO, and events. Kristen spends her time outside of work acting, learning nature photography and joining in the #instadog fun with her Pug/JackRussell, Bella.

We have one reason marketers host and sponsor events.

Whether you want to get more leads, increase brand awareness, or meet with current customers to upsell and build customer lifetime value, marketing events ultimately leads to the same destination: increased revenue for a greater Return On Investment (ROI).

Despite this common goal, according to The Event Marketing Evolution, a research report by the Harvard Business Review, only 23% of companies can track event ROI.

Notice here that we say can rather than do track ROI, making these results even more concerning and surprising.

So our question to is this: How will you ensure you’re in the elite group of marketers who:

• Can track the success of their event sponsorship?
• Regularly track event results, and improve their strategy as needed?

In this Process Street article we will answer these two questions, and walk you through the steps that ensure you aren’t throwing your previous marketing dollars down the drain.

To start at the beginning, we find our selves before the day of the event.

With that, let’s not waste any more time, and get straight to it. Click on the subheaders below to jump to the relevant section. Alternatively, scroll down to read all.

• Event ROI: What it is and how to measure it
• Event planning: The pre-event strategy and planning stage
• Event partners: Your internal and external event partners
• Event ROI: Choosing an event that obtains a strong ROI, must-ask questions
• Event data: Capturing event data
• After the event: Measuring and building your success after the event
• Marketing events with Process Street

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This is a guest post from Stella Lincoln who works as a Business Executive at Academist Help. She is a passionate blogger and owns the blog Educator House. Lincoln has many years of experience in digital marketing and specializes in search engine optimization (SEO).

In this era of globalization and digitization, marketing takes many forms. We at Process Street recommend one marketing strategy: Make sure you strongly focus on email marketing, or more specifically, your email conversion rates.

Why?

Email marketing is a successful strategy. Done correctly it can bring in the highest Return On Investment (ROI) relative to other marketing channels. Email marketing offers a return of 30x your initial investment.

Wow.

But let me emphasize, such a high ROI is only possible if you get your email marketing right.

How do you get your email marketing strategy right?

One aspect is through email Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

Through intuition, I am guessing you are ready to optimize your email conversion rates – after all, you came here. Well, reader, you can use this article as your top-tip list for all things CR and email optimization.

In this article, we give you our 12 top ranking tips to optimize your email conversion rates. You can click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that given section. Alternatively, scroll down and read all we have to say.

• Optimize your email conversion rates: CRO meaning
• Optimize your email conversion rates: Email optimization and why it is is important
• Optimize your email conversion rate with these conversion rate optimization best practices
• Use Process Street to optimize your email conversion rates

Let’s get started!
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In the words of Jean Rostand, a French Biologist, and Philosopher:

“The obligation to endure gives us the right to know” – Jean Rostand, Silent Spring

Greenwashing, as a marketing tactic, thwarts our right to know as consumers. Unfortunately for us, 98% of green-labeled products are greenwashed.

Greenwashing is unethical. Greenwashing is risky. Greenwashing needs to be prevented.

You can think of this Process Street article as an antidote to greenwash. We give you the information you need to identify and stop greenwash in its tracks. We do this because greenwash is not good for you as a consumer, and it is not good for you as a business owner or employee.

Like Rostand, we at Process Street believe everybody has a right to know how green the products and services they purchase are. In this article, we provide information that will give you back this right where greenwash blots it out.

Paint strippers at the ready, it’s time to peel away the dross. Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Greenwashing: Greenwashing definition
• Sustainability templates to help you create a more sustainable business
• Environmentalism: Fashion or passion?
• Greenwashing: A troubling evolution in the corporate world
• Greenwashing examples
• Greenwashing: You have to spot it to stop it
• Greenwash: Green companies and how you can be one

Let’s jump right to it!
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