Microsoft Visio is the industry standard for business process modeling, but you might want something different. Something a little more… agile. Just because it’s the most widely used, doesn’t mean it’s the best.

The main reason it’s so widely used is that it’s packaged with Office 365 and often comes pre-installed with enterprise tech suites.

If you’re tired of Visio’s lack of integration, lack of macOS compatibility, and sky-high price point, then you should consider investigating one of the many Visio alternatives out there (like Process Street!) and asking yourself what they can do for you.

There are a lot of options for different use cases; in this article, we’ll take a look at some of the best Visio alternatives and talk about why they might be a better choice.

Here’s a breakdown of the article:

• What is Microsoft Visio?
• What should business process modeling software be good at?
• Best Visio alternatives
• Using Process Street to implement business process modeling

You’re probably all-too-familiar with Microsoft Visio, but for the sake of clarity, let’s start with a quick overview.
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This is a guest post from Hugh Beaulac, a content strategist at MC2 who also works as a social media manager. With over 6 years of digital marketing experience, Hugh helps small and medium businesses grow online and likes to share his tips and tricks with top-notch marketing blogs like Wordstream, CrazyEgg, and Semrush. Follow him on Twitter to read his latest articles on Instagram marketing.

In the era of social media, when over 2.82 billion people have at least one social media account, email marketing isn’t the most obvious marketing tool.

It’s no wonder that more and more brands use social media platforms to promote their products and services as their target audience is active on these channels.

But here’s the thing: Although email is one of the oldest messaging channels, it still matters.

Why? Because nearly all social media users have active email accounts.

Recent Hubspot report claims that email marketing is still effective: 99% of customers check their email every day, 73% of people claim that email is the preferred communication channel to receive branded news and offers, and 59% of customers say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.

For marketers, this means that combining social media and email marketing is a must. And with the growing popularity of Instagram marketing, there’s a perfect way to connect with engaged users and get more email list subscribers.

In this Process Street article, we’re covering:

• Why use Instagram to get email list subscribers
• Make the most out of your Instagram bio
• Give your customers a reason to share an email
• Use Instagram Stories to promote sign-ups
• Reach potential subscribers who don’t follow
• Benefits of Instagram marketing
• The Ultimate Guide to Instagram Marketing

Let’s take a look at four effective ways to grow your email list with Instagram.
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Fleet management is so much more than simply owning and operating vehicles. It’s a complex interplay of many different factors and optimizations – much like the concept of business process management.

In recent years, more and more tools for fleet management optimization are emerging. Fleet management is changing.

Projected growth of the fleet management industry to about $30 billion by 2022 is largely driven by advances in technology – and the rate at which fleet management companies adopt this emerging technology will largely impact the rate of this projected growth.

And it seems fleet management companies are aware of this.

The National Conference of State Fleet Administrators (NCSFA) recommended in a 2018 survey of 44 state and university fleet participants that fleet management companies begin implementing “robust fleet management policies and procedures” as well as “accelerating the implementation of technology to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of fleet management practices”.

That same survey showed that 38% of repairs and 39% of preventative maintenance work were insourced, on top of the in-house work that is done as part of routine fleet management. Just another incentive to tighten up your processes and streamline all of that manual work with a good, solid process.

In this article, we’ll be looking at how you can use Process Street to implement robust fleet management policies and procedures. I’ll cover:

• What is fleet management?
• What is fleet management software?
• Fleet management templates
• Using Process Street for fleet management

Let’s start by making sure we’re all on the same page; what exactly is fleet management?
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Perhaps you’ve heard about checklists. Perhaps you know someone who uses checklist templates. Who knows, you may even have a simple checklist template or two you use in your own business.

Chances are, if you clicked this link, you’re interested in learning about simple checklist templates. Or specifically, how you can use them to run your business more efficiently.

You probably already know the basics – why checklists are useful, and the value of using a BPM software like Process Street. But you want more.

You want to know the essential checklists, the ones all the top CEOs and successful executives are using. You want ready-made checklists that will save you time, money, and confusion, and you want to learn about some of the immediate benefits of using simple checklist templates, straight from the mouths of those who have used them to run successful businesses of their own.

Well, you clicked to the right article. Here, I’ll be looking at an extensive correspondence between our content team and a number of successful SMB owners who just happen to be simple checklist template champions.

Whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, or otherwise, we’ve devised this article as a resource that will help you understand how you can use simple checklist templates in your business.

Breaking it down, we’ll look at:

• Benefits of simple checklist templates
• What simple checklist templates are successful business owners using?
• Simple checklist template essentials: Recommendations from top business owners
• How to build a simple checklist template with Process Street

But first, what is simple checklist template, anyway?
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You’ll often hear the question: “Which is better? Kanban or Scrum?” or variations of this eternal deathmatch between two of the most well-established agile methodologies.

People are wasting energy fighting over which methodology trumps another. If you’re an agile organization, you should be placing principle above practice.

It makes a lot of sense to ask questions like “why might I want to use Kanban over Scrum?”, or even “Kanban and Scrum” as opposed to “Kanban vs Scrum”. There are a lot of differences between the two, but fundamentally, they are both agile methodologies, and the principle behind why you might want to use both can be in alignment.

You may even find they can work well together, as part of a unified strategy referred to as Scrumban. You need to consider what approach will work best for your team.

My aim with this article is to approach the question of “Kanban vs Scrum” by clearly presenting both approaches in terms of when, how, and why you might choose to use either of them.

I’ll also talk about the capacity for overlapping Kanban and Scrum approaches, and how some additional tools like Process Street can factor into that equation.

Here’s a breakdown of how we’ll approach comparing “Kanban vs Scrum”:

• What makes a team agile?
• What is Kanban?
• What is Scrum?
• Kanban vs Scrum: Differences
• Kanban vs Scrum: Similarities
• What is Kanban good for?
• When to use Kanban
• Kanban process
• What is Scrum good for?
• When to use Scrum
• Scrum process
• Using BPM for agility

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How do you stand out against overwhelming competition? You need an edge; a value proposition isn’t enough on its own.

You need to make sure you’re out-competing the competition by keeping costs down and understanding the value you’re delivering to your customer. But how do you continuously improve your value offering while keeping costs down?

Enter the value chain.

A value chain is a model of looking at all of your business processes and figuring out how to gain a competitive advantage by focusing on developing maximum value in your product or service, while keeping your profit margins in the green at the same time.

Originally proposed by Harvard’s Michael Porter in his 1998 book Competitive Advantage, there’s a lot of ground to cover. Where do you start? What’s the process? What kind of tools exist to make the value chain analysis easier?

Well, if you’re looking for a clear, concise introduction to Michael Porter’s Value Chain model, you’ve come to the right place. Read on for a breakdown of:

• What is a value chain?
• Michael Porter’s original value chain model
• Value chain analysis
• Benefits of value chain analysis
• Value chain analysis process
• Value chain vs supply chain
• Porter’s primary value chain components
• Porter’s secondary value chain components
• Bonus: Porter’s Five Forces

By the end of this article, you should have a firm grasp on the value chain model, with a better idea of how to apply it to your own business. We’ll also investigate how to integrate BPM software like Process Street into the value chain.
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This is a guest post from Shawn Mike. Shawn has been working with writing challenging clients for over five years. His educational background in the technical field and business studies has given him the edge to write on many topics. He occasionally writes blog articles for Dynamologic Solutions.

According to statistics, it is claimed that US organizations suffer a loss of $62 billion a year thanks to unsatisfactory customer service.

Customer service represents your secondary acquisition test, beyond actually getting that customer on board in the first place.

It’s very much a short-term game of conflict resolution, and your business depends mainly on how you deal with customer feedback and requests.

For maximum lifetime value, you need to consider how to synergize customer service with customer success.

It must be kept in mind that customers are the heart of every business and should be at the top of your priority list.

Satisfied customers help increase sales and build brand identity and reports claim that 77% of customers are estimated to recommend a brand or business to a friend depending on how good their experience with your product is.

Which is why focusing on keeping your customer base satisfied with great service and excellent products can go a long way in improving your sales.

Nowadays, consumers expect more than just a great product. They need you to guide them through the perfect experience. A better customer experience equals a greater lifetime value expectancy.

This article is all about figuring out the best way to analyze and improve customer experience by automating a lot of the manual work that can get in the way.

We’ll focus on:

• Understanding customer success
• Difference between customer service and customer success
• How to improve your customer success strategy
• Benefits of customer success automation
• How to successfully automate customer success
• Example customer success process template

Read on to learn more about how to optimize your customer success strategy. There’s even a free Ebook for you at the end of it!
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Approvals are everywhere. If you’ve worked on any project involving any kind of deliverables, chances are you’re all-too-familiar with the approval process (or rejection process, depending).

Documents, prototypes, reports, mock-ups, wireframes, storyboards, and even more internally-facing elements like simple holiday leave requests. All of these represent different kinds of approval process, and approvals are an integral workflow element.

Approvals can also represent a major bottleneck.

Consider how you are currently approving work in your business. Perhaps you have a vague process involving emails, and if you’re particularly attentive you might be tracking it in a spreadsheet.

These methods are slow and prone to delays. You have no way of tracking anything reliably, you are more likely to miss approval windows, and information has to be sent manually between individuals.

What’s more, it’s quite difficult to improve this process without the proper system in place. You need to make sure you’ve got the right tools to optimize your approval process.

Process Street‘s approvals feature is the solution to this problem.

We created the approvals feature to make the process of approving work as fast and easy as possible.

With approvals, you can:

• Get notified as soon as work is ready for approval
• Approve (or reject) work with zero friction using a clear, streamlined interface
• Approve on-the-go, from your phone’s email inbox
• Synergize with many other Process Street features to optimize process efficiency
• Save time and stay on top of your workflow

In this post, I have a trove of templates to showcase the approvals feature. All of the templates in this article are custom-built to make your life easier.

They also take advantage of Process Street‘s other powerful features like rich form fields, conditional logic, dynamic due dates, and role assignments.

So, read on for:

• A quick introduction to approvals
• Different types of approval process
• How to add approval tasks in Process Street
• Approval process best practices
• 20+ free approval process templates (each use-case explained)
• How to approve tasks straight from your phone
• Optimize your approvals with more process street features
• More great workflow automation resources

Read on to learn how to hit the ground running with the approvals feature.

From humble beginnings as a simple clone of the then-popular first-person shooter Quake, Half-Life would eventually become the first installment of one of the most successful video game series of all time.

Today, Valve Inc. is one of the most renowned, innovative, and successful game development companies worldwide, boasting one of the largest video game digital distribution service platforms on the planet, a range of pioneering virtual reality hardware and an impressive roster of instantly recognizable and widely-loved game titles.

Specifically, the development of the original Half-Life makes for an interesting case-study, and represents a model of innovative agile organizational management.

Half-Life is remembered as one of the best games of all time, and the intense environment in which it was created – where the Cabal process was born – is testament to that legacy.

Companies like Valve, Zappos, Semco, and even Google have come up with different models to enable the potential of their workers. These methods give power to the employees to pursue their own entrepreneurial pet projects.

Tesla’s innovation is equal part production process as it is the product; you need only look to the hulking Gigafactories to find evidence of this.

Similarly, Facebook’s success is not just in the service it offers users, but also how it was designed to scale to billions of users.

The process of organizational management is always an important factor in the outcome of these hugely successful products.

In this post I’ll be looking at democratic methods of organizational management, with a particular focus on Valve’s Cabal process. I’ll also mention a couple of other interesting examples of holocratic organizational management, and talk about our own internal structure at Process Street.

Here’s a quick breakdown of each section, if you want to jump ahead:

• What is organizational management?
• Valve’s Cabal game design process
• Zappo’s holocratic organizational management system
• Semco’s organizational management success story
• How digital democracy plays a role in organizational management
• Process Street’s organizational management structure

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In 2018, Apple rolled out their brand new iPad Pro; top-of-the-line, cutting-edge, very slightly bent- wait, slightly bent?

Customers on social media and several on the MacRumors forums have discovered their iPad Pros exhibited this slight bend straight out of the box.

Of course, Apple’s response was that this was completely normal, and absolutely not a defect.

Despite the publicity Apple gives its “ultra precise” quality manufacturing process, more and more issues like these are appearing. The bendy iPad Pro is looking less like an exception, and more like an increasingly problematic trend.

Here’s a comprehensive quality breakdown (quite literally) of the iPad Pro in question:

It’s interesting to note that while Apple is bragging about premium materials such as the sapphire camera lens cover, tests like the scratch durability test done in the video above pose glaring questions to Apple’s quality standards.

Other quality management blunders from Apple’s recent track record include:

That’s a lot of issues for a company that continues to charge top dollar, push prices up, and boast a reputation as a pioneer in quality assurance.

Obviously, and for whatever reason, there is a problem somewhere in Apple’s quality management process.

Quality control and management is important to ensure the customer gets the value they deserve, and quality management standards like those defined by the ISO 9000 family exist to make quality management work better.

Although Apple has received certification for ISO 27001 (an information security management standard), it doesn’t appear that they have any ISO 9000 certification for quality management. Who knows, if they had, perhaps they wouldn’t have so many QC issues?

In this article, I’ll be looking at the ISO 9000 family of quality management standards, breaking down the basics and giving you a few free checklist templates to get you started with your own quality management system.

Here’s exactly what I’ll be covering:

• What is ISO 9000?
• What is ISO 9001?
• ISO 9000 for quality management systems
• Why is ISO 9000 important?
• Benefits of ISO 9000
• ISO 9000 certification
• Implementing ISO 9000 with Process Street
• Free ISO 9000 templates
• Relevant ISO/SOP articles

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