Value capture is, in essence, the end-all, be-all of a company’s life-cycle. Yes, you likely have other motivations for starting your company, but without capturing any value, your company will have a very short lifespan.

When it comes to acquisitions, if you don’t have a good strategy to drive value capture, you’re not only wasting your time, but hobbling your future potential in the process. If you look at some notable examples like Daimler Chrysler and Sprint/Nextel, it’s pretty clear that a bad deal will stick to you for a long time.

You might even end up as a cautionary tale for future M&A executives. No one wants that. Aspire to be the Apple of acquisitions. You can do that by focusing on four distinct levers that drive 80% of value capture.

Four things. They’re not even difficult things.

So in this Process Street post, I give you the rundown of the four levers you need to prioritize during your acquisition, and exactly why they make such an impact:

• Pursuing the ever-elusive value capture
• Lever #1: Utilize your functional teams early in the acquisition process
• Lever #2: Complete your commercial & operational due diligence before closing
• Lever #3: Assess the revenue & cost synergy potential of the deal
• Lever #4: Develop a realistic strategic operating model design

Let’s get to it!
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Imagine a military regiment holding a position of key tactical importance, let’s say a bridge. Situational awareness is crucial. The success of the operation depends on access to information that can inform situational awareness, and provide tactical & strategic advantage. In other words, a situation where information is nothing short of vital.

Such a regiment would have access to a large-scale technological intelligence network: aircraft spotters, satellite-mounted motion sensors, heat detectors, and communication eavesdroppers. Commanders with high-bandwidth taps into the supporting intelligence network should have access to vital information to enable decision-making while in the field.

Now let’s imagine that an opposing force seven times the size of this regiment began approaching from three directions. Such a force should not be difficult to detect given the field intelligence available; yet that’s exactly what happened according to David Talbot’s story published in 2004’s MIT Technology Review about the U.S. Army’s 69th Armor Regiment holding a key bridge on the Euphrates River in 2003.

This story perfectly illustrates the problem of vertical vs horizontal knowledge.

The problem was, front-line troops had terrible situational awareness because the flow of information was inhibited by a vertical command-and-control structure (rather than a horizontal flow).

Information had to travel up the chain of command so that major commanders in the rear could interpret it, and then send their decisions back down the line. This resulted in huge latency; the information was there, it just wasn’t getting to the people who needed it when it mattered most.

Talbot’s story goes on to contrast the organizational structure of SPEC-OPS forces organized into small teams of two-dozen; rather than being linked to a single central command, the teams were networked to each other with a designated individual per team responsible for managing flow of information (between their team and the others’).

In these special forces units, flow of information was “flat”, or horizontal; leadership contributions & decision making involved every team member, not just the official designated leader.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at how you can implement horizontal knowledge management in your organization.

• Horizontal vs vertical knowledge
• Achieving operational excellence with horizontal knowledge
• 4 step guide to horizontalize knowledge in your organization

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This is a big blog post about Business Process Management software (BPMS).

If I’ve succeeded in doing what I set out to do, this article should provide pretty much everything you could ever need to know about BPM software.

At its core, the article is built around the following pillars of BPM software:

• BPM basics: The idea behind it
• BPM in practice: How to use it
• A glossary of BPM terms
• A list of top BPM software
• Use cases of BPM software
• Using Process Street for BPM

I have tried to distil the information in this article to only the most crucial elements, and many sections have been abbreviated where they deserve entire articles to themselves!

Thankfully, where necessary I have provided links to supporting material where these concepts are expanded upon, should you be interested in delving deeper.

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Imagine if Google broke. That one day, it just stopped working.

I know it’s a scary thought…

In 2013, Google actually did break, although, only momentarily (for a whole 5 minutes to be exact). The outage affected all of its services, meaning Youtube, Gmail, Google search, Google Maps … everything stopped working.

The outcome?

Global web traffic plummeted by a whole 40% and the blip is estimated to have cost Google around $500,000.

If your product or service suddenly stops working as intended, then it’ll cost your organization a hefty sum, too.

That’s why, in this quick but informative Process Street post, you’ll learn all about test plan templates and how to use one yourself to ensure your product or service runs like a well-oiled machine. All-day, every day.

Alternatively, to jump to a specific section, click appropriate the link below:

• What is a test plan?
• What is a test plan template?
• Where the software test plan began
• Best practices for creating a test plan template
• Software test plans today
• How to write a test plan template

Let’s get started!
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Now we come to the heart of our consultant’s guide to Process Street – how to document client processes and deliver them as efficiently as possible.

This is your bread-and-butter in any BPM software, and by weighing up the pros and cons of the various ways you can manage business processes, you’ll be able to see what best fits your company and customers.

I’ll be detailing the method, advantages, and disadvantages of:

• Documenting client processes in your own Process Street organization before handing them off
• Setting up a new organization in the app to later hand off the whole thing
• Accessing and working inside a client’s existing Process Street organization

I’ll also be covering the various options for actually documenting client processes (such as using new or premade templates), collaborating with clients to get the best results possible, how to hand off business processes, and when to set up integrations with other apps.

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This article is based on a segment from Process Street‘s Highway 2021 virtual event, where Leverage CEO Nick Sonnenberg shares with us how his team kicked their operational efficiency into overdrive from start to finish.

Supercharging Operational Efficiency with Leverage CEO Nick Sonnenberg was the fourth segment of Highway.

You can check out our playlist of the full Highway event here, and don’t forget to create a Free Account with Process Street!

Here’s the Supercharging Operational Efficiency with Nick Sonnenberg segment in full:

• The scavenger hunt problem
• How fast should you scale your business?
• Complexity scales exponentially with team size
• CPR: Communicate, Plan, Resource
• Static knowledge vs. dynamic knowledge
• Pro-tips for optimizing company processes

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The commercial drone industry is still young – it desperately needs processes for compliance and efficiency

With all of the excitement surrounding commercial drone applications, it’s more important than ever to ask yourself – do you have the tools in place to maximize the potential of your drone fleet?

Without the proper tools to build and refine the perfect business processes, you risk wasting resources trying to figure out sub-optimal approaches to common problems.

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Imagine for a second that you own a global, fast-food chicken restaurant chain.

You know, one that sells Portuguese, peri-peri style chicken. The kind of place that sells lunchtime meals at dinnertime prices. You know the type I mean?

Now think. What’s the worst thing that could happen to your fast-food chicken restaurant chain?

A bout of food poisoning would be pretty bad, or a new KFC opening up right next door would be pretty demoralizing.

But what about running out of chicken? As an internationally recognized chicken restaurant, that would be pretty devastating. Right?

Well, that’s exactly what happened to Nando’s over the New Year holiday period.

We’ll come back to the Nando’s story later, but for now, let’s tuck into this Process Street post on procurement…

In one ‘fowl’ swoop, we will cover the following procurement topics:

• Procurement: What it is (and isn’t)
• Why you need to get procurement right
• How to go about procurement effectively
• Procurement in the modern world
• Digitizing the procurement process with Process Street

Egg-cited to start? Let’s go!

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“Where there is judgment, there is noise – and more of it than you think.” – Kahneman, et al Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

The city I live in is home to a very old, very beautiful, and very famous cathedral. It’s been a hotspot for tourists since the days of Chaucer (of course they weren’t called tourists then) and still plays an integral role in the community.

No matter where you are in the city, you can see that distinctive spire above everything. If you managed to get turned out (not as difficult as you might think with many small, medieval streets), that spire will lead you straight back to the center of town. It’s pervasive and omnipresent in such a way that – ultimately – leads to it being utterly ignored.

The main thing you need to know about this cathedral, though, is that it has bells. Loud bells, and many of them. And these bells toll. A lot. Like a lot. Not that briefly pleasant trill of bells you might get on the hour or quarter-hour, either. Some days, I’d swear the bells never stop ringing at all.

The thing is, much like the spire, I never paid much attention to the bells – until they stopped. For the year+ of varying levels of lockdown during the pandemic, the bells remained silent. Lockdown ended and things started reopening, including the cathedral and the cacophonic celebration of every pigeon coo by those accursed bells.

Yeah, it’s become a bit of a thing.

This, dear reader, is an example of noise – both literally and figuratively. The cathedral has always been there – unobtrusive, in the background, subtly influencing my actions and habits without any conscious awareness on my part. It shapes the way I move through the city, my awareness of time, my mood, my memories; but, before lockdown, if anyone asked me if it had any impact on my life, I probably would’ve shrugged and answered, “Not really.”

Noise is everywhere, and it affects every decision we make – especially because we aren’t even aware of it. We all know to check our biases when it comes to important decisions, but how often do you check your noise?

At Process Street, we take good decision hygiene very seriously, so this post will examine the idea of noise presented by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein in their book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, and use those ideas in our very own Noise Audit Workflow.

Feel free to skip ahead for the workflow, or stick with me as I discuss the theory of noise:

• What do we mean by “noise”?
• Noise in action: Be quiet! I’m trying to think.
• Reduce noise by focusing on the process
• Check your noise with the Process Street Noise Audit Workflow

Let’s make some noise!
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Business process testing is crucial for operational success.

Why?

All businesses have recurring tasks that have to be accomplished on a regular basis.

This inevitably leads to some sort of written process that helps guide team members on how to accomplish that particular task. As a company grows these processes should get updated, automated, and reviewed for relevancy. The point of this is to ensure that the team is as efficient as possible and that the process is helping as opposed to hindering.

This is where business process testing comes into play.

A study conducted by Łukasz Tartanus of Procesowcy.pl found that 69% of the companies they surveyed had documented and repeatable processes built out. However, only 4% of the 236 participating companies measured and managed them! A GAP analysis isn’t needed to determine a quick win on how to improve efficiency.

• What is business process testing (BPT)?
• Business process testing methodology
• Implementing BPT
• Challenges of business process testing
• Streamline operations with an effective business process testing strategy