British Airways chief executive described the incident as “catastrophic” as 800 flights were canceled and 75,000 travelers were affected.

Flight compensation website flightright.com estimated that British Airways would have to pay around €61m to passengers for refunds alone under EU legislation. Add to this the cost of reimbursing angry passengers for unexpected hotel stays and other inconveniences, and the total financial damage to British Airways has been estimated at £100m.

Why? Someone turned their data center off and on again.

The entire airline was down for almost 2 days. This wasn’t a natural disaster, it was a process failure.

In this article, we’ll explore how to spot process failures before they occur using a system called Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). We’ll assess an overview and then delve in deeper to ground our understanding and include a premade Process Street FMEA template to help you run your own assessments in future.

In this article we’ll cover:

• Your free FMEA: Failure Modes and Effects Analysis template
• FMEA? What is Failure Mode and Effects Analysis?
• When do we use FMEA?
• Conducting and documenting Failure Mode and Effect Analysis: A user’s guide
• What happened to British Airways?
• How can FMEA help us prevent this happening again?

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Before we dive into the world of ISO audits, if you’re savvy on ISO audits and are just here for a complete, actionable, and totally free ISO 9004:2018 self-audit checklist, you can grab that here:

Otherwise, read on.

What is an ISO audit?

An audit in the context of ISO standards is the process of making sure a certain business system or feature, whether a process itself, a quality management or business process management system, or a product, is compliant to certain requirements.

The requirements by which the compliance of an organization are assessed could be defined by certain ISO family standards, or they could reflect the need to analyze certain performance indicators or business needs.

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Marie Kondo has been a bit of a Netflix phenomenon.

For those not familiar, she ventures into untidy cluttered homes and encourages people to get rid of the things they don’t need.

It’s a pretty simple base concept, in all honesty.

But the show has caught on thanks to a cutesy approach of seeing deeper meaning behind the art of decluttering.

Does this bring me joy?

… is the question Kondo forces her subjects to ask.

Sparking joy is a central theme of the Kondo approach, and this cleverly takes the workplace concept of 5s and resituates it within the home.

In this Process Street article, we’ll explore:

• What is 5S?
• What can we learn from Marie Kondo’s interpretation of 5S?
• How does 5S fit into other workplace concepts?
• How can you implement 5S into your business?

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

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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This is not just another blog post on workflow software, describing what it is and why it’s important.

Nevertheless, I will quickly mention for those of you who doubt its importance, that the global market size of workflow management systems is estimated to grow at a staggering rate of 23% from 2016 to 2021, shooting up in value from $3.5 billion to just under $10 billion.

In short, it has already begun to establish itself as a key competitive battleground for years to come.

The intent of this post is to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the purpose and use of workflow software, its application in various industries, the role of automation, methods for continuous improvement, and top tips for getting started in a fast, high-impact fashion.

It’s long, it’s heavy, it’s everything you need to know.

Ultimately, I am aiming to provide a practical guide to help you get the most out of the software you use for workflow management.

If you don’t currently use software to manage your workflows, then you must be at least considering it, otherwise you wouldn’t be spending valuable minutes of your day reading this.

In any case, skim through, extract any nuggets of information you find useful, think about your internal business processes and how getting started could improve your team’s productivity and forward strategic goals. It really is surprisingly easy (and affordable) to get the ball rolling.

The goal of this post is to provide you with clear information you need to:

• Understand what workflow software is, how it works and key features
• Evaluate whether or not you need workflow software right now
• Understand the benefits of utilizing workflow software
• Know how you can get started quickly and with minimal stress
• Implement workflows effectively with a 5-step process
• Have a solid understanding of how to set up automation for even greater efficiency
• Set yourself up to achieve both short-term and long-term strategic goals

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I got bitten by a dog recently, and, funnily enough, it gave me the idea for this article.

The dog wasn’t at fault; it was the process that led to me having to get 5 vaccines over the course of a month, wherein my only major complaint was the way patient records were kept and processed at the hospital I went to.

You know how frustrating it is to deal with a business with inefficient, ineffective processes?

Every single time, I had to fill out my name and address again in some tattered paper version of a spreadsheet that got shoved in a filing cabinet. After I’d gone to do that, they were able to confirm that I needed injection 3 because of the paper ‘injection passport’ I got given, and I was sent to pay for this particular session before coming back to queue up again.

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What do Three Mile Island, the Hubble Telescope, and the Ford Pinto have in common?

They all had fatal flaws caused by their substandard quality management systems.

While most failures that could be solved with a thorough QMS don’t result in a combined $3.9 billion in damages and 180 deaths, it’s impossible to argue that such a system couldn’t also bring massive benefits to your own business.

To name but a few, these effects include:

• ISO compliant
• Being more productive
• Becoming more efficient
• Reducing employee turnover
• Systems for measuring and tracking successes and failures
• Better customer loyalty
• Not causing a nuclear meltdown

Sadly, quality management system explanations tend to come with a lot of jargon and dry text. That’s why we here at Process Street bring you this guide on how to create and implement one.

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Let’s get straight to the point – you’re probably searching for a policy and procedure template you can actually use (bonus points if it’s ISO compliant).

So, if you just want an actionable policy and procedure template, you can find two hand-crafted examples below. One of them is basically a blueprint you can use to build out your own, and the other is a fully filled out example of the first, using a fictional company called Brightstar Marketing.

Both can be easily edited and updated by you inside Process Street.

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“We’re here for YOU“, the sign in front of me mocked as I waited my 22nd minute in line at the local store. We could all hear the staff chatting in a back room (a team-wide “lunch break”), discussing the weather while the rest of us silently fumed.

It’s horrible when a business doesn’t put their customers first.

That’s the problem that an omnichannel approach is designed to solve.

Following up from Whitney Blankenship‘s post about omnichannel marketing in e-commerce, we here at Process Street decided to tackle the subject as a whole and show what it means to be an omnichannel business in action.

From theme parks to banks, we’ve got a little of everything. Before all that though, there’s something we need to get straight…

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ISO standards can be confusing and intimidating.

However, with the 2015 updates, it really shouldn’t be that scary.

In the past, conforming to ISO meant huge manuals and a lengthy process to change how tasks were approached.

Now, there is increased flexibility and the opportunity to utilize software to speed up your systems and make everything easier to handle.

This is why we’re presenting you with our concept of Agile ISO: how to combine structured compliance with the rapid process improvement of a startup.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• What is ISO?
• What is ISO 9000?
• What is Agile ISO?
• What is needed to support Agile ISO?
• How to get started with Agile ISO in 5 easy steps

I’m going to try to be brief and clear while cutting the bullshit.

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