Growing up on an island, my favorite food was in abundance: Fish.

However, whenever I ate at a restaurant there was always a voice in the back of my head wondering if the fish had been mismanaged and, due to that mismanagement, I’d get sick.

My anxiety around food safety wasn’t exactly unfounded. Fish is the most commonly impacted food group when it comes to disease outbreaks, and a quarter of a million people in the U.S. get sick each year from contaminated fish. And when it comes to all food groups, the CDC estimates that a whopping 1 in 6 Americans (which equates to 48 million people) become ill each year due to foodborne illness.

However, by not coming at food safety with a HACCP approach – and by creating and following a solid HACCP plan – these figures could be far, far higher.

Ergo: HACCP is important and, as a business in the food industry, you can even be required by law to go about HACCP properly.

To help you out, in this post I’ll discuss what HACCP and a HACCP plan are in detail, HACCP’s history, the benefits, and how Process Street can help you with all-things HACCP and food safety.

Just read through the following sections:

• What is HACCP (and what is a HACCP plan)?
• The incredible history of HACCP
• The benefits of HACCP (and having a HACCP plan)
• Use Process Street for all-things HACCP!

Let’s swim through the rest of the post!

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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

According to a survey performed by KPMG and Forrester only 34% of decision-makers say they feel confident in their data …

A sad state of affairs.

Fortunately for the 66% of decision-makers who cannot rely upon their data, there is an answer *drum roll please* . . . the Enlightenment . . . of data.✨

Who would’ve known a school of thought that revolutionized the 17th and 18th centuries could be harvested to optimize our present-day data management?

“The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the sovereignty of reason.” Dorinda Outram, Panorama of the Enlightenment

Governed by a philosophy of rationality the Age of Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason) made decisions based upon a single source of power or primary source of knowledge. The source of truth and knowledge in this instance was determined by the senses.

Single Source of Truth or SSOT, the focus of this Process Street blog post, also takes the sovereign approach.

However, rather than the senses, the sovereign power for SSOT is a reliance on un-replicated, autonomous, self-contained, and enhanced data.

To find out more about SSOT and how it can enlighten your data processes, keep reading.

Alternatively, to jump to a specific section of the post, click the appropriate link below.

• The path to Data Enlightenment
• ‎What is Single Source of Truth
• The role of data for Single Source of Truth
• ‎How to obtain a Single Source of Truth
• ‎Single Source of Truth in practice
• ‎Single Source of Truth is Data Enlightenment

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You need to start using a timeline template.

Why?

Whether you’re showing off your company’s milestones to potential investors, breaking down a project into individual tasks for your team, or just organizing your week to come, a timeline template will let you forget about formatting and get straight down to recording and using your relevant data.

Every single one of these is free to use and doesn’t require an email address, account creation, or anything of the sort – I’ve just collected the best templates from across the web in one place for you to have a wide selection. All 18 will be organized into one of four categories:

• Calendar timeline
• Linear timelines
• Project timeline templates
• Spreadsheet timeline templates

In our previous post – What is an SLA? How to Use Service-Level Agreements for Success – we gave you the complete lowdown on SLAs.

From learning what an SLA is to why you need one, and what goes in an SLA to the different types of SLAs available, you learned about the incredible usefulness of SLAs without the high-level, confusing baloney.

It piqued your interest, right?

Perhaps you even thought about making a shiny SLA template yourself, but realized creating an SLA is not exactly an easy endeavor.

Don’t worry.

I too know the difficulty involved with creating SLAs – but they’re needed. They’re there to establish trust and accountability, and at a time when 10 out of 15 companies are rapidly losing the trust of others, creating SLAs for your customers and clients will put you at a great advantage.

That’s why, in this post, I’ll be providing you with additional tips and tricks for creating, editing, and using SLA templates. You’ll also get your hands on easy-to-use Process Street SLA templates, from which you can create an infinite number of SLAs without hardly any effort (I’ll be focusing on one in particular)!

Just read through the sections below to get started:

• Free SLM and SLA templates
• What is the SLA definition?
• How is a service level agreement created?
• Using Process Street’s service level agreement template process
• SLA example templates to use as inspiration
• How Process Street can aid you with further SLA management!

Let’s get rocking and rolling.

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You need to invest in lean tools.

Why?

Studies show that moving towards a leaner business model can improve productivity by up to 25%, increase stock turnover by 33%, and increase on-time delivery by 26%.

The recognized benefits of being lean are only accumulating, with more and more studies advocating lean approaches in business for both economical and sustainable success.

However, some companies choose not to embrace lean philosophy through fear that the costs related outweigh the benefits gained. With this, we at Process Street have come to help.

You see, this fear has oozed from imperfect implementation and a misunderstanding. With the right lean tools and techniques, lean thinking can easily and successfully be applied.

In this article, we present you with our top 8 lean tools to assist you in implementing lean philosophy for your business or line of work. By using these tools, you will see a transformation, with maximal value and minimal waste.

Along with these tools, we grant you access to our template resources, which you can hop in and use right away for free.

Click on the relevant subheaders below to read the section of choice, alternatively scroll down for all I have to say.

• What is lean?
• The 5 lean principles
• Lean tools: Our top 8 lean tools to assist lean principle application
• Lean tools and the benefits they give
• Lean software tools you should use today

Keen to become lean? Let’s jump in!