Have you ever wished you could get some of those pesky work tasks done more easily while on the move, or out-and-about? Those routine tasks and emails that take so much time out of your day, that you would give an arm and a leg to be able to automate?

Or, picture this: you easily send a quick follow-up email, record meeting notes in real time, create new projects, send surveys, schedule meetings, and much more by simply talking to Siri.

You can do all of this and more with Shortcuts for iOS 12 in combination with Siri and Process Street, using the power of Zapier integrations.

Shortcuts, formerly known as Workflow, puts Siri in the control seat of your business workflows, with more power and usefulness than ever before. Using custom phrases recorded and added to Siri’s library of voice gestures, you can trigger a series of actions across multiple apps.

There are two ways to use Shortcuts. The best option is the Shortcuts app itself, which is where you can create your own workflows from scratch. The app also comes with a gallery of suggested shortcuts curated by Apple. Separate from this, Siri will recommend shortcuts based on your daily iPhone activity. You can see these in Settings under Siri & Search.

Here’s a quick list of all of the ideas I’ll be covering in this post, before we dive in:

• 1. Dictate meeting notes straight to your CRM
• 2. Send an electronic contract when timing is crucial
• 3. Master your calendar in an instant
• 4. Kickstart your client onboarding process
• 5. Get paid faster by sending your invoices ASAP
• 6. Assign your team members on the go
• 7. Grab and archive snapshots of your working screen-space during a technical audit
• 8. Jump straight back into your drafts, anywhere, any time
• 9. Dictate an email to your assistant
• 10. Manage your tasks with a dynamic to-do list

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This article is a guest post from Isaiah Jackson.

Team collaboration is not a new thing.

However, team collaboration is so poorly practiced within many organizations that we need to find new ways to facilitate it.

In the modern digital world, team collaboration is incredibly easy and can be achieved from in the office or in the home.

In this article, we’ll explain how effective team collaboration can allow you to operate your business either with remote staff or with staff being given the freedom to work from home flexibly.

Having home-working opportunities can unleash employee satisfaction, retention, and attainment. Modern approaches to team collaboration enable this.

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

• Why the traditional office dynamics are in decline
• The benefits of working remotely
• How team collaboration tools make remote work possible
• The key team collaboration tools used by the team at Process Street
• Why you should encourage your employees to work from home
• Team collaboration tools help in achieving a work-life balance

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Renegard uses Process Street to enable manual, on-the-ground workers to execute tasks more efficiently and enable their managers to oversee all activity in real-time. They also use process automation to streamline the hiring and onboarding process. We spoke to their CEO, David Martin, about how they are using Process Street, what benefits they are experiencing, and how Renegard sees their usage of the platform progressing in the future.

The Renegard Story

From pickup trucks to boats and large-scale construction equipment, Renegard provides its customers with high-performance protective coating for a range of vehicles.

Ultimately, their mission is to help you get the most out of your vehicle by applying coatings that are guaranteed to protect it from wear and tear as well as more significant damage.

Their two trademarked products, Alphagard and Solargard, are extremely tough coatings that can be used for both interior and exterior applications. They are available in a variety of colors and can be custom color matched.

Given that they apply their coatings to vehicles all across the US, Renegard employs a large number of contractors to perform the manual-intensive work. These individuals need to follow strict processes in order to ensure that coatings are applied in the proper way each and every time.

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 The following is a guest post by Uwe Dreissigacker. Uwe is the Founder of online invoicing software InvoiceBerry. InvoiceBerry helps small business owners and freelancers to create professional looking invoices, get paid online and keep track of unpaid invoices. In his free time, Uwe travels a lot, explores new cultures and loves trying new spicy dishes.

As a business, if you want your operation to run smoothly, managing productivity and your workflows is one of the best ways you can stay on track.

Before you even get started on a project, you should first take a step back and plan out your approach.

What methodology will you use? How will you manage productivity and stay on track? SCRUM? SWOT?

Decisions, decisions…

The choices can be overwhelming. Not to mention, over the course of the actual project, you’ll have to make hundreds of other choices.

If you’re not sure where to begin, it’s best to think about your project as a whole and then select the right methodology you’ll follow – Waterfall or Agile?

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Universal Modeling Language (UML) is a way of visualizing a software program using a collection of diagrams. That is perhaps the simplest way to define it.

If you’re looking for a full-winded definition, here it is:

“The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was created to forge a common, semantically and syntactically rich visual modeling language for the architecture, design, and implementation of complex software systems both structurally and behaviorally.” – Lucidchart, What is Unified Modeling Language

UML has many advantages including flexibility, an abundance of tools, and the capacity to model systems from both a structural and behavioral perspective.

Nevertheless, it can sometimes be overwhelming.

A focus on simplicity is, therefore, essential to not only creating actionable diagrams, but also to avoid pulling your hair out in the process!

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The importance of efficient purchase order management

Effectively managing purchase orders is a critical component of any business with vendor relationships. And yet, according to the founder & COO of Procurify, Kenneth Loi:

“Many organizations unwisely forego purchase orders because they perceive the paperwork to be a hassle that slows things down.”

He’s right. Paperwork is a hassle and does slow things down. However, this is not a good enough reason to forego purchase orders, hence the word “unwisely”.

From creating a requisition to gaining approval and receiving an invoice from the vendor, there are up to 7 documents involved in the purchasing cycle. That is a lot to keep track of for a single purchase.

And this only gets more complex as a business grows.

Maintaining a paper-based system at the enterprise level is virtually impossible. For smaller companies, it’s do-able, just incredibly inefficient.

The frustration and inefficiency that comes with managing piles of paperwork is no longer an unavoidable obstacle to overcome. By establishing an automated purchase order workflow, you can centralize documentation, seamlessly track progress in real-time, and shorten purchasing cycles.

Gone are the days where signing contracts involved figuring out how to connect to a printer, scanner, or photocopier.

And don’t get me started on fax machines.

Now we live in a glorious new world of rapid digital signature workflows.

There are many kinds of digital signatures. Some may think of the high-tech encrypted keys people like Julian Assange have used to prove whether messages came from them or not.

But let’s be honest, outside of our international secret agent daydreaming we’re not likely to need to use those. What we need is the simple act of being able to add our signature on to digital documents with the fewest number of clicks possible.

Those interested in soccer may remember the high profile signing of David de Gea by Spanish giant Real Madrid from Manchester United. Or, actually, you won’t remember it. Because it didn’t happen. The documents were to be sent in the last moments of the transfer window, and the whole multi-multi-million dollar deal fell through due to a broken fax machine.

Digital solutions to contract workflows are important.

That’s why in this Process Street article we’re going to look at:

• The 5 best digital signature tools
• Digital signature integrations you can use today
• How to connect digital signatures with the workflows in your business

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Processes are all the rage right now, and we’re very pleased to be leading the charge in making processes agile and actionable for organizations of all shapes and sizes.

We’ve written countless pieces about creating a process, writing standard operating procedures, or building business systems.

But sometimes we’re guilty of assuming that having a process automatically makes something organized. It doesn’t.

If you’re a solopreneur or working in a startup, managing processes is fairly easy. You have a limited number and you can easily scroll through to find the one you need when you need it.

But what about large organizations? Companies where people on different teams are in different countries? Businesses where different departments speak and operate in different languages?

How can we manage processes on such a large scale, and what does that tell us about managing processes for small businesses looking to scale?

This is where a process library comes in.

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

• What is a process library?
• Why you should build a process library for your business
• Determine your information architecture before building your library
• How you can build a process library in Process Street
• Harnessing the power of Process Street’s templates!

Or, if you’ve just come for the templates, grab them below:

• Process Library Checklist
• The Process for Optimizing a Process

Let’s get started!

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Modern business is a fast paced game and there are always new ways you can discover to improve your operations and output.

One of the easiest and simplest ways to improve the day to day running of your business is to supply your team with better tools.

With the array of modern SaaS products available on the market there are specialized tools for a host of use cases.

We use Close.io for our sales team, Intercom for customer support, and Process Street for our business process management throughout the company.

But if you’re a department within a larger company, or a team within a department, how do you convince top management and finance to sign off on a new software product to boost your team’s performance?

In this article, we’re going to give you a step by step guide of how to make that happen. Including:

• What is a purchase requisition?
• The difficulty of bureaucracy
• 3 important factors to convince finance
• How to write a proposal for a new software purchase requisition
• Create or improve a purchase requisition process

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You have probably used Linux today — especially if you don’t have an iPhone. And if you browsed the web today, there’s a big chance that the website you visited was served by Linux, too.

Linux is an operating system, but unlike software like Microsoft Windows and macOS, Linux was developed by a self-organized community of volunteers.

Over time, with the effort of over 10,000 developers and evolving processes to manage the scale of work, the Linux kernel has grown to over 20,000,000 lines of code in total. It forms the stable foundation for…

• Every Android phone and tablet on the planet
• 66% of the world’s servers
• 100% of the top 500 supercomputers

This technology didn’t come from an orchestrated team with a thick policy book and layers of management. It came from a few carefully-chosen and culturally-embedded policies, and a shared mission.

In this post, I look at how a technology so essential, complex and important could have been produced so effectively without traditional management structure. But first…

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