All posts in Business Processes

FMEA: How to Prevent the £100m British Airways Catastrophe

Quality leader inspecting an unbranded aircraft systems prototype for failure risks

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) helps a team identify how a process, product, or service could fail, understand the effects, and prioritize preventive action before customers feel the impact.

The 2017 British Airways catastrophe shows why that discipline matters. An early estimate put the potential cost as high as £100 million, while IAG later reported an estimated gross cost of about £80 million. The IT outage disrupted tens of thousands of travelers and exposed how a single failure can travel through an interconnected operation.

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Smash the bottleneck – Getting started with documenting systems

Business systems leader opening a constrained valve to smash the operational bottleneck

A business bottleneck is a point where routine work waits for one person’s memory, review, or approval. When every decision has to pass through the owner, control becomes a constraint and the business can only move as fast as that person.

The way out is not to abandon control. It is to replace micro-managing with a clear system: document the work, delegate ownership, and define when the team can act independently. In other words, learn the three habits that remove owner dependency: documenting, delegating, and trusting.

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Gap Analysis: How to Bridge the Gap Between Performance and Potential

Operations leader lowering a mechanical bridge span to close a performance gap

A gap analysis is a structured comparison between performance in the current state and potential in a measurable target state. It identifies the gap between them, investigates why that distance exists, and turns the findings into an action plan.

This guide explains what a gap analysis is, where it is useful, the main types and tools, and a practical process for moving from evidence to implementation. It also shows how to assign owners, deadlines, and review points so the analysis leads to improvement rather than another report.

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Enterprise Automation: How to Make 100 Employees Feel Like 1,000

Header image: Enterprise Automation: 100 Feels Like 1,000

Enterprise automation is the coordinated use of rules, workflows, integrations, user-interface automation, and governed AI to move work across an organization with less manual coordination. It does not remove people from the operating model. It gives them a reliable system for routine work while preserving human ownership of judgment, exceptions, and consequential decisions.

That is how 100 employees can feel like 1,000: not because automation creates a literal tenfold productivity guarantee, but because the same team can spend less time copying data, chasing status, routing requests, and repeating predictable steps. The useful question is not whether a task can be automated. It is which parts should be automated, which controls must remain visible, and where a person needs to decide.

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What Is an Employee Assistance Program (EAP)? Everything You Need to Know to Better Your Team

People operations leader opening an employee assistance support case with confidential referral pathways

An employee assistance program (EAP) is an employer-sponsored or union-sponsored benefit that gives employees confidential access to short-term counseling, assessment, referrals, and practical support for personal or work-related problems. Services vary by provider and location, but a credible EAP creates a clear route to qualified help without asking a manager to act as a clinician.

EAPs matter because employees do not leave grief, anxiety, family strain, substance-use concerns, financial stress, or relationship problems at the workplace door. In March 2025, 62% of civilian workers had access to an EAP, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This guide explains what EAPs cover, how confidentiality works, what benefits are realistic, and how to set up and administer a program responsibly.

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DMAIC: The Complete Guide to Lean Six Sigma in 5 Key Steps

Lean Six Sigma quality engineer calibrating a five-stage DMAIC improvement rig

DMAIC is a five-step, data-driven improvement cycle: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. Used in Six Sigma, it helps teams find and remove defects in an existing process.

This guide walks through each step, the measurements and tools used at each stage, and the controls that keep an improvement from slipping back.

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Gemba Walk: How to Strive Forward by Taking a Step Back

Header image: Gemba Walk: Step Back, Strive Forward

A Gemba Walk is a structured visit to the place where work happens. Leaders observe the real process, ask respectful questions, learn from the people doing the work, and identify improvements grounded in evidence rather than assumptions.

You have heard of moonwalking. A Gemba Walk moves in the opposite spirit: step into the work, slow down long enough to see it clearly, then strive forward with the people closest to the process. This guide covers the meaning, purpose, questions, practical steps, and follow-up that make the practice useful.

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Fleet Management System: Essential Templates for Fleet Managers

Fleet operations manager presenting a miniature commercial service van

A fleet management system is the connected set of software, vehicle data, records, and operating procedures used to keep a commercial fleet safe, available, compliant, and cost effective. It gives fleet managers a reliable way to see what is happening, decide what needs attention, assign the work, and prove that it was completed.

That matters whether you manage delivery vans, field service vehicles, heavy equipment, or a mixed fleet. A missed inspection, overdue repair, incomplete driver record, or unexplained fuel spike can become a safety risk and an expensive service disruption. The system should connect information to action instead of leaving decisions scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes, and individual memory.

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What Is Headless BPM? The Process Layer Agents Can Call

What is headless BPM, a process engine running with its cover removed

Headless BPM is business process management in which the process engine runs independently of any user interface. The process definitions, the runs, the task state, the approvals and the audit trail all live in the engine, and every one of them is reachable over an API. Whatever calls the engine gets the same behaviour and the same enforcement, whether that caller is a custom front end, a mobile app, a nightly script or an AI agent.

The word headless comes from content management, where a headless CMS separates the content repository from the presentation layer. Business process management had the same separation available for years and mostly ignored it, because the interface was the product. Agents changed that arithmetic. A process that exists only as a sequence of screens is a process no agent can read.

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14 Essential Workflow System Features to Make Your Team Into Superstars

Operations manager standing beside a freestanding control console showing linked task cards, a checklist column, a progress bar and labelled modules for assignment, due dates, approvals, logic and reporting

Whether you’re writing a blog post or building the world’s largest commercial aircraft, you need to be able to rely on your systems. To do that, your platform has to have a set of basic workflow system features.

That is unless you want to follow Airbus A380’s example and waste massive amounts of time and money because of a few simple oversights.

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