ISO means standards. A standard is just a set of requirements, decided by experts, for doing something specific.

A lot of standards exist under the banner of ISO, for all sorts of things, from quality management, to environmental and social responsibility guidelines, to how to design medical devices.

They’re useful because they help you to write good processes; how to structure, organize, implement, and improve on them.

At the heart of ISO is the principle of systematizing your approach to process management in your company – simple as that! You might be scared of ISO, but there’s really no need to be intimidated. What’s more, recent changes have made it easier than ever to get started with ISO standards.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at everything ISO, including (but not limited to):

• What is ISO? A simple introduction for normal people
• Management System Standards (MSS)
• Quick tips: How to use Process Street for ISO
• ISO & SOP (Standard Operating Procedures)
• ISO for BPM (Business Process Management)
• Continuous improvement: a central theme of ISO
• ISO templates index
• Agile ISO
• Automating ISO with Process Street
• Relevant case studies
• Further reading on ISO

Let’s start with the basics. What exactly is ISO?
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Consumer Reports publishes an annual reliability survey, which includes data on over 470,000 cars.

In this report, owners of Tesla’s Model 3 experienced a number of problems, including chassis hardware, paint and trim related faults, indicative of a build quality that fell far shorter than expected standards set across the automotive industry. The Model 3 represents Tesla’s first real attempt at a mass-market electric vehicle, and the issues surrounding its launch created much frustration and controversy among electric vehicle enthusiasts.

This lack of quality assurance has lost at least one major $5 million order of Model 3 vehicles from a rental company, in relation to problems with the service and performance of previously purchased vehicles.

In an email, NextMove wrote:

“Tesla Model 3 vehicles, which NextMove was supposed to take over after payment and only a short examination, sometimes had serious defects: defective tires, paint and body damages, defective charge controllers, wrong wiring harnesses or missing emergency call buttons. Such quality defects would have endangered the safety of the customers and the profitability of NextMove.”

Stefan Moeller, Managing Director of NextMove, went on to say:

“We had to insist on compliance with general quality standards and processes in order to protect our renters and our business model.”

Why did Tesla have so many problems? Crucially, Tesla made the decision to deliver the product to market and sort out the issues later.

Basically, they didn’t have a strong enough system for managing quality.

We call these Quality Management Systems (QMS) – and they work.

The rest of the auto-industry follows a specific quality management system structure. It’s called ISO/TS 16949:2009 and it’s a variant of ISO 9001.

People follow quality management systems for various reasons; they improve quality first and foremost. But they also have a positive impact on the bottom line.

The return on investment (ROI) of a quality management system is typically impressive:

As a guide, a recent study undertaken through the American Society for Quality (ASQ) showed that for every $1 spent on your QMS, you could expect to see an additional $6 in revenue, a $16 reduction in costs, and a $3 increase in profits. On average, they saw that quality management reduced costs by 4.8% – ASQ

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at how ISO 9001 can be used to assure quality control across all types of organizations, with benefits like improved company performance, higher demand for products, and a competitive advantage towards increasing market share.

What we’ll cover:

• ISO 9001: Free templates!
• What is ISO 9001? A simple introduction
• Anatomy of ISO 9001: 2015 for Quality Management
• Quality management: What is it & why does it matter?
• ISO 9001 for continuous improvement
• Agile ISO
• What does it mean to be ISO 9001 certified?
• ISO 9001 audit
• Implement ISO 9001 with Process Street
• Related ISO standards

For the uninitiated, what is ISO 9001, as simply as possible?
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In recent years, the rate of commercial fleet driving accidents in the US has increased by about 20%.

The fleet management industry has responded in turn with a re-emphasis on the importance of vehicle and driver safety, chiefly due to the preventable nature of many of these vehicular accidents.

Fleet management systems have grown more and more complex; far beyond the basic cc tracking system of its past.

Today, more vehicle-dependent businesses are implementing these systems to improve the monitoring of their drivers and vehicles, encourage safer driving habits, and facilitate better company-wide transparency.

If your company is managing a large fleet of hundreds or thousands of vehicles, a fleet management system is key to keeping track of everything related to your employees and assets.

Managing your fleet without a system in place inherently leaves room for potential complications and human error, even if your fleet is smaller in size. For example, if a driver gets into an accident, you may run into problems when filing an insurance claim, or it might be difficult to quickly reach your driver to obtain an ETA for a customer.

Fleet management systems are designed to mitigate these potential issues and help strengthen your daily processes, making them more efficient and organized than ever before.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be covering:

• What is fleet management?
• What is a fleet management system (FMS)?
• Key responsibilities of a fleet manager
• Advantages of fleet management systems
• Fleet management templates
• How to use Process Street for your fleet management system

Let’s start with the basics.
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One of the most important things you can offer your customers and employees is consistency.

Your customers need consistency in your products and services, your employees need consistency to help them do their job efficiently, and your company needs consistency in order to continuously improve your policies and procedures.

The best way to make sure that you have consistency within your company is by implementing standard operating procedures (SOPs).

Most companies already have SOPs that their employees follow, but they’re either rarely updated, or they’re never even properly documented to begin with.

This is often because writing, reviewing, and regularly updating your SOPs can typically take a lot of time, especially when starting from scratch.

But thankfully, there are ways to make your job a lot easier.

That’s why in this Process Street article, we’ll go over the general guidelines for the SOP format and other ways you can streamline your processes to help you get started building your SOPs.

We’ll be covering:

• What is a standard operating procedure (SOP)?
• What does the SOP format look like?
• Should your company use an SOP template?
• Using Process Street to build your SOPs

If you’re simply looking for a SOP format to get started with, then look no further!
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This is a guest post by Sam Bocetta, a retired engineer and current freelance journalist who specializes in writing about cyber defense, data privacy, and online security.

Cybersecurity is a process, not an event.

Though there are some tools and systems that you can put in place to dramatically improve the security of your workflow, in reality the best way to protect yourself against hackers is to stay constantly vigilant for emerging threats.

For this reason, rigorous cybersecurity practices should be built into your general workflow. They should be an integral part of building a knowledge management system, and integrated into everyday business practices.

One of the most powerful ways of doing this, and one that will also ensure that you don’t miss anything important, is to use checklists to codify daily, weekly, and monthly security tasks.

This system should also clearly indicate responsibility for each task, and specify mitigation steps should any issues be found.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• Building a security checklist
• Creating a security culture
• How to use Process Street to incorporate security into your workflows
• More information security resources

Before specifying the tasks that should be part of your security workflow, let’s look at why having a regular security checklist is so important.
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ISO 9001; you may have heard of it. You may be somewhat afraid of it. And, if you’re reading this article, chances are you’re probably at least somewhat confused about how to actually implement it.

It’s possible you even Googled something like “what is ISO 9001?”. Perhaps you felt you knew at one point, but the important bits never really stuck.

Well, with the 2015 updates to a whole range of ISO standards, it’s a lot less scary.

Before now, if you wanted to implement any ISO standard, you’d have to undertake a lengthy process involving unwieldy paper manuals and cumbersome bureaucratic procedure.

In short, ISO 9001 was hardly agile.

Now, you have far more flexibility to implement ISO 9001 the way that works for you best; with BPM software like Process Street to make things streamlined and simple.

This is why we’re presenting you with this handy overview of ISO 9001, including all of the essentials you need to get started.

We’ll cover how to combine structured compliance with the rapid process improvement of a startup, including:

• Free ISO 9001 Templates
• What is ISO 9001? The most popular QMS standard
• Benefits of implementing ISO 9001
• Quality management with ISO 9001: Key principles
• ISO 9001 certification: Is it necessary?
• Agile ISO 9001 in 5 simple steps
• More ISO resources

Before we dive in, here’s some free templates to help you hit the ground running!
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If you hear the term “fleet management” and assume its only importance is to keep track of your fleet and the location of your vehicles and drivers, then you’ve assumed wrong.

Over the past several years, fleet management software has evolved beyond the basic tracking system most people expect from it and the number of business owners choosing to implement it is growing every day.

Fleet management may not be challenging if your company has only a few vehicles, but if you have hundreds or thousands of vehicles, you’ll need to implement fleet management software, because the manual labor needed would be completely out of hand.

Managing your fleet manually leaves a lot of room for potential issues. To name just a few, you might struggle to get in contact with your drivers when necessary or, if an accident occurs, you’ll run into more complications when filing an insurance claim.

Using fleet management software alleviates these problems and helps avoid any new problems that may arise.
In this article, we’ll cover:

• What is fleet management?
• What is fleet management software?
• Benefits of fleet management software
• Key features of fleet management software
• Tips for choosing the right fleet management software for your company
• Best fleet management software
• How to use Process Street to streamline your fleet management

Before we dive into the different fleet management software mentioned in this article, here’s a quick list of useful fleet management templates:

• Facility inspection checklist
• Forklift inspection checklist
• Inventory management process
• ISO container inspection checklist
• Order fulfillment
• Order processing checklist
• Vehicle inspection checklist
• Warehouse safety checklist
• Scheduled maintenance notification
• Vendor management: Supplier evaluation
• Vendor management: Contract negotiation

If you’re not sure what a Process Street template looks like, check it out here:

Read on for more tips on how to use Process Street to streamline your fleet management operations! Continue Reading

I’m very proud and excited to announce that Process Street has raised a $12M Series A for its no-code workflow app. Accel leads the round, with participation from Atlassian, Salesforce Ventures, and other amazing investors.

The funds will go towards our vision of building the GitHub of no-code, where teams around the world can find and use checklists, workflows, and automations to improve their productivity at work.

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The importance of the relationship between product and marketing is something that’s often overlooked.

But when the product and marketing teams aren’t on the same page regarding the product and the problems it aims to solve, chances are the marketing won’t match the product’s value proposition and in turn, will discourage potential users from signing up.

This could be detrimental to the success of a product organization.

So, what can you do to avoid these miscommunications and build a synergistic relationship between the two?

In this article, I’ll share some tips and information that will be critical in strengthening the relationship and performance of the product and marketing teams at your company to achieve success.

We will cover:

• What is product marketing?
• Understanding the product-first marketing approach
• Product marketing synergy
• Benefits of product marketing
• 3 Key elements to product marketing synergy
• How to use Process Street to strengthen product marketing strategy
• Product marketing synergy: The bottom-line

Let’s get started!
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Knowledge is power, but you need a system in place to harness that power effectively.

Everything that happens in your business depends on some kind of specialized knowledge, whether it’s new employee onboarding, dealing with customer requests, compliance issues, or marketing a new feature launch.

Your knowledge management system is the firm foundation upon which you build your business.

Despite this, statistics show that as many as 40% of employees do not utilize proper knowledge management solutions, and between 7-20% of their time is spent figuring out a problem from scratch when the solution already exists somewhere in the company.

These bad business practices cost Fortune 500 companies $31.5 billion each year.

How much money are you losing, and how much time are you wasting without a proper knowledge management system in place?

Knowledge management shares many fundamental principles with the idea of business process management (BPM), and as such it’s possible to use BPM software like Process Street to implement a powerful knowledge management system.

In this article, we’ll be looking at:

• What is a knowledge management system?
• Knowledge management system benefits
• How to build a knowledge management system
• Knowledge management software
• Using Process Street as a knowledge management system

Let’s start by understanding some basic principles of a knowledge management system.
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