On October 3rd 2017, the Financial Times reported that Tesla shares had slumped after the business hit a bottleneck in its production.

Tesla shares fell nearly 2 per cent to $335.91 after the Palo Alto-based company said that it produced just 260 of its Model 3 vehicles in the third quarter, well below the target of more than 1,500 that chief executive Elon Musk had predicted for the month of September alone.

What caused that failure to hit the target?

A bottleneck.

A bottleneck is when one process in a chain of processes cannot perform to the standard of those around it, creating a delay which damages the other processes.

No matter how well Tesla creates batteries or programs its self-driving software, if the factory can’t, for example, install tires fast enough then Tesla can only produce cars at the rate it installs tires.

That poor process brings all of production down to its level. Business output becomes defined by its weakest link.

But it’s not just shop floor industrial processes which fall foul of these problems. Any business or set of operations will be faced with this challenge too. In this article, we’ll look at a couple of approaches you can use to attempt to identify and overcome bottlenecks in your business.

• Flow charts help you visualize current operations
• The Five Whys technique allows you to identify root causes quickly
• Toyota’s three concepts for process implementation focus your improvement
• How Process Street can assist in beating bottlenecks

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As a gateways to the internet, browsers are one of the most popular types of software out there. Everyone needs one, but which is the best? The market changes so quickly, it can be hard to keep up with the facts.

Which is the fastest? Which has the best extensions? Which is the most secure? While many people use Chrome, or their default pre-installed browsers, this doesn’t necessarily indicate a ‘best’ browser.

If you’re reading this, you want to find the fastest, most capable, browser for your needs. Finding the most popular isn’t enough, because those stats aren’t always related to quality.

In this article, I’m going to use hard data to decide on the best browser on the market, looking at the most popular options: Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, Opera, and Vivaldi.

I’ll compare speed, memory usage, range of extensions, privacy, and usability.

Looking for a new browser? Want to be sure you’re using the best technology on the market? Keep reading for a full data-driven comparison after a general overview.

Click here to skip down to the hard data and avoid the broad overviews

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In the first quarter of 2017, the AppStore and Playstore saw record revenues yet again with a whopping total of $15 billion worldwide, representing a year over year growth of 45%.

Add in other online sales and the amount of money being spent is astronomical.

But how do we process all these sales? And what means of processing is best for your company?

We’ve pondered the question at Process Street and decided to write up our findings. In this article, we’ll compare Stripe, Paypal, Square, and Braintree to see what each do and how they do it. We’ll analyze those findings and suggest which might be better for different kinds of businesses.

The key areas we’ll compare are:

• Features – what do they offer and what can’t they do?
• Pricing – where can we find those small gains which make a difference at scale?
• Ease of use – can a regular person integrate it into their business, or is a developer needed?

But first, let’s look at some of the different use cases for these payment platforms to contextualize our investigation.

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Process Street is the Compliance Operations Platform for teams that need workflows to run in the right order, with the right people, and with proof that every required step was completed. Teams use it for everything from employee onboarding to content promotion workflows.

Some processes are too delicate to run as a free-for-all checklist. Stop tasks give you more control over the order tasks are completed by pausing a workflow run until the blocking task is done.

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There’s a lot of advice on the internet. Some of it is good, some of it is terrible, and some sits in the gray area between.

Within the fields of tech and startups, a lot of what people do day to day is influenced by what they’ve learned online; I doubt many people reading this article learned in school how to effectively market a product over Instagram!

Sorting the good from the bad is a challenge we all face, and one we have to become better at as individuals and as a society.

Improving our ability to analyze information doesn’t just mean identifying fake news, though we will look briefly at it. It also means being able to take a second look at informative journalism and the reporting of research; the kind of information which you might use to inform big business decisions. We’ll look at:

• The importance of recognizing the gray area in complex issues and reviewing the source text.
• How media reporting of studies can often obscure the real points
• Why certain models of investigation can have inherent flaws, and why you should be wary of that.

At the end I’ll follow up with the 10 step process you can use to improve your analysis. This process is pulled from the recommendations of Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, and Michael Shermer, and repurposed for your professional needs.

But first, let me tell you a little story…

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With today’s fast pace of living, it’s vital to have on-the-go access to everything that’s important to your work.

Rather than staring blankly out of a window on your train or bus to work, you could then instead be planning your day and organizing meetings, or commenting on tasks and sorting through your inbox to avoid getting distracted at the office.

However, with the sheer variety of technology on offer it’s also difficult to know what mobile apps you should be using.

That’s why I asked the Process Street team to share the best mobile apps for business they have installed and how they use them.

From the most valuable apps across our entire company to one-off niche cases that could do with a little more exposure, in this article I’ll highlight the apps that let our team stay productive and make every moment count.

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Are you ready to market your SaaS product to enterprises? Do you know what makes or breaks a million dollar deal?

There’s a huge segment of SaaS companies that target only SMBs, and an increasingly well-funded bunch that go after the enterprise market from the outset. Some, like Dropbox, Asana, and HubSpot, have gradually scaled their products to meet the needs of enterprise customers. By looking at their enterprise-specific landing pages, we can isolate the key factors these companies have chosen to persuade enterprises, and find out what works.

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What connects a 75% drop in infection rates, a 48% increase in home rebuilding speeds, and an extra 400 hungry families receiving the supplies they need to get by?

Have you guessed yet?

That’s right. Effective process analysis and implementation. Specifically, the Toyota Production System process analysis and implementation.

In this article, we’re going to look at some of the heartwarming success stories of process implementation carried out by the Toyota team.

The human side of organizational systems demonstrate the importance and effectiveness of learning and understanding how to create continuous improvement in your processes.

Throughout these examples we’ll see a number of key Toyota concepts employed and how they worked in practice:

• genchi genbutu – to “go and see”, to embed yourself in the system and observe,
• kaizen – to employ ideas of continual improvement, making small iterative changes,
• muda – to identify waste, and to recognize that what constitutes waste is contingent on your situation.

From disaster relief to pediatric hospitals, the benefits of strong process analysis are clear for all to see.

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On August 25th, we launched a library of 1000+ real sales and emails from the top 280 SaaS companies.

The library was hosted on a microsite, Inside SaaS Sales, which allows users to browse the full sales cadences, organized in the order the message or voicemail was sent.

The launch landed us almost 800 votes on Product Hunt, 10,000+ site visits, a mention in Hiten Shah‘s SaaS Weekly, and publicity from the SaaS and VC community.

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Launching a website can be a huge undertaking. A successful launch requires managing many moving parts including content, design, marketing and the technical side. That’s why we have created this handy checklist for you to use on your next website launch or redesign.

And don’t forget, you can get this as an interactive checklist that you and your team can collaborate around. Just create a free account with Process Street and grab it from the examples section.

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