This is a guest post written by Alexis Humphrey. Agency owner turned business coach, Alexis Humphrey is on a mission to help freelancers and agency owners maximize their potential by showing them how they can earn more and work less so they can create a life they love. Connect with her on Linkedin or join her private Facebook group.

Steve Jobs built his empire around one clear principle – simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

In his own words:

“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs, Apple’s Steve Jobs

And Warren Buffet agrees…

What does Buffet look for when he invests in a business?

The answer: Something that is simple and reproducible, like Coca Cola, McDonalds or Gillette. These businesses work like machines – the production process is repeatable, and the output is always the same.

In this Process Street article, you will learn how to fine-tune your service-based business into simple and reproducible processes, building a remote agency machine.

This transformation requires consistency and the consistency of processes. With Process Street, this consistency becomes easily attainable. Learn how to set up Process Street processes and establish a solid ground to build your remote agency machine. A remote agency that works on automation, documented processes and requires very little of your time. A remote agency that brings in money, whilst you lay back sipping pina colada’s on a Brazilian beach.

Sound appealing?

Of course it does.

Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Building a remote agency: Maintaining consistency and documenting recurring tasks
• Building a remote agency: Treating your service as a product
• Building a remote agency: Customized chaos
• Building a remote agency: Repeatable systems
• Building a remote agency: Customized chaos vs repeatable systems
• Building a remote agency: Business processes
• Building a remote agency: Why do business processes matter?
• Building a remote agency: How to get started
• Building a remote agency: Embedding processes in your business
• Building a remote agency: The secret sauce

Let’s get started!
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Workflow approvals are a bottleneck of the worst kind.

Projects get delayed waiting for approval, and those reviewing the work spend more time searching for the piece than they do reviewing it.

“Professionals take 18 minutes on average to locate a document manually––20% to 40% of their time––and spend 50% of their time searching for information.” – Ashish Deshpande, 50+ Key Statistics to Help You Automate Smarter in 2020 and Beyond

That’s where we here at Process Street come in.

We know how important it is to have an effective method for organizing your workflow approvals. Heck, everything our content team does goes through at least two rounds of review before it goes live.

Check out task five in the following free process template for a snapshot of how we handle workflow approvals with Process Street!

That’s why today we’ll be covering:

• What is a workflow approval?
• Workflow approval benefits
• How to create an approval workflow
• How to supercharge your approval process
• 21 free approval templates

Let’s dive right in.
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One of the most important things you can offer your customers and employees is consistency.

Your customers need consistency in your products and services, your employees need consistency to help them do their job efficiently, and your company needs consistency in order to continuously improve your policies and procedures.

The best way to make sure that you have consistency within your company is by implementing standard operating procedures (SOPs).

Most companies already have SOPs that their employees follow, but they’re either rarely updated, or they’re never even properly documented to begin with.

This is often because writing, reviewing, and regularly updating your SOPs can typically take a lot of time, especially when starting from scratch.

But thankfully, there are ways to make your job a lot easier.

That’s why in this Process Street article, we’ll go over the general guidelines for the SOP format and other ways you can streamline your processes to help you get started building your SOPs.

We’ll be covering:

• What is a standard operating procedure (SOP)?
• What does the SOP format look like?
• Should your company use an SOP template?
• Using Process Street to build your SOPs

If you’re simply looking for a SOP format to get started with, then look no further!
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This is a guest post by Sam Bocetta, a retired engineer and current freelance journalist who specializes in writing about cyber defense, data privacy, and online security.

Cybersecurity is a process, not an event.

Though there are some tools and systems that you can put in place to dramatically improve the security of your workflow, in reality the best way to protect yourself against hackers is to stay constantly vigilant for emerging threats.

For this reason, rigorous cybersecurity practices should be built into your general workflow. They should be an integral part of building a knowledge management system, and integrated into everyday business practices.

One of the most powerful ways of doing this, and one that will also ensure that you don’t miss anything important, is to use checklists to codify daily, weekly, and monthly security tasks.

This system should also clearly indicate responsibility for each task, and specify mitigation steps should any issues be found.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• Building a security checklist
• Creating a security culture
• How to use Process Street to incorporate security into your workflows
• More information security resources

Before specifying the tasks that should be part of your security workflow, let’s look at why having a regular security checklist is so important.
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Picture this: You’re on vacation.

(Sounds good already, huh?)

It’s summer. The sun’s shining. You’re on a beach with white sands and an ocean so clear you can see the coral.

You think, “Hey, I wouldn’t mind an ice cream right about now.” So you go to the ice cream kiosk before it closes for the day, choose your flavor of choice, go back to your towel, and eat it.

It’s the best ice cream you’ve ever had.

You want more.

But it’s gone. (And the kiosk is shut, too.)

Your vacation is ruined. R U I N E D.

Sometimes, one of something isn’t enough. Not just when it comes to delicious food, but also concerning more practical things like iPhone charging cables (why are they so flimsy, Apple?!), and of course, checklists.

Having multiple checklists holds you and your team in incredibly good stead when it comes to all kinds of business-related activity, no matter if the team works in marketing, engineering, sales, or customer support.

But don’t take my word for it.

Take the word of the 30+ businesses who’ve offered their insights to the Process Street community regarding the types of checklist they use (and why). Read through the following sections to get the complete lowdown:

• What makes having different types of checklist beneficial?
• How teams utilize their varying types of checklist
• Tips and tricks for making various types of checklist for your team
• Tools used to create different types of checklist
• Use Process Street for every kind of checklist imaginable!

Now, forget about that ice cream – there’s work to do!

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In 1836, Edward Bulwer-Lytton came up with the adage “the pen is mightier than the sword“.

Bulwer-Lytton was referring to good writing and effective communication being the most powerful tool of all. So powerful that it could win wars.

In business’ modern-day war against tough deadlines, seemingly never-ending workloads, and stiff business competition, Bulwer-Lytton’s adage still rings true.

Particularly when it comes to penning checklists.

Here at Process Street, we’d go far as to say that checklists are something of a secret weapon hidden in plain sight. They maximize productivity, minimize stress and anxiety, and can keep perilous human error at bay.

But the rewards can only be reaped if checklists are well-written.

Not sure how to write checklists properly? Confused whether you’re penning checklists the right way or not?

I’ve got you covered in the following sections where you’ll learn what checklists are used for, why they’re so useful, on top of being given tips and tricks for writing checklists from 15 thriving companies:

• What are checklists?
• Why are checklists so useful?
• Tips & tricks for writing checklists from 15 thriving businesses
• Writing checklists: The key takeaways
• Use Process Street for writing checklists efficiently and effectively!

Now, it’s time to march onwards!

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At Process Street, we’re all about checklists. We use them for absolutely everything.

I have a checklist for my daily tasks, a checklist for writing this blog post, and even a checklist for planning our monthly sprint!

Basically, no task is too big nor too small for a checklist.

But it got us thinking – what are the best ways to use checklists to get maximum value from them?

My personal view is that they’re most useful for highly regular recurring tasks, like a sales call or dealing with an IT support ticket.

My reasoning here is that following the checklist gives you incremental benefits, so the more you follow it the more you benefit. Moreover, the more you follow a business process, the more you understand it’s faults and failings, allowing you to make improvements. Therefore, using a checklist to follow a business process for a task which you do multiple times a day will give you the highest efficiency savings and output increases.

This is compounded if you use a tool like Process Street due to its automation potential; you can automate data entry for data gathered during the task, you can trigger another action in another app, or you can automate the approval process for a completed task.

So I think I have a pretty strong case for why the most common actions benefit most from checklists, but that doesn’t necessarily tell us how they can work best for you.

In this article, you’ll look at a few different ways of employing checklists and get great insight and input from across the industry, as part of Process Street’s original research.

• Checklists in the workplace: Notes and ad hoc checklists for organization
• Checklists in the workplace: Employee tasks and recurring processes for efficiency
• Checklists in the workplace: Idea generation and getting good work done
• How not to use checklists in the workplace
• Gaffes and mixups; the hilarious happenings of checklists gone wrong!
• Start using Process Street checklists in your workplace today!

Let’s get started.

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Fleet management is so much more than simply owning and operating vehicles. It’s a complex interplay of many different factors and optimizations – much like the concept of business process management.

In recent years, more and more tools for fleet management optimization are emerging. Fleet management is changing.

Projected growth of the fleet management industry to about $30 billion by 2022 is largely driven by advances in technology – and the rate at which fleet management companies adopt this emerging technology will largely impact the rate of this projected growth.

And it seems fleet management companies are aware of this.

The National Conference of State Fleet Administrators (NCSFA) recommended in a 2018 survey of 44 state and university fleet participants that fleet management companies begin implementing “robust fleet management policies and procedures” as well as “accelerating the implementation of technology to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of fleet management practices”.

That same survey showed that 38% of repairs and 39% of preventative maintenance work were insourced, on top of the in-house work that is done as part of routine fleet management. Just another incentive to tighten up your processes and streamline all of that manual work with a good, solid process.

In this article, we’ll be looking at how you can use Process Street to implement robust fleet management policies and procedures. I’ll cover:

• What is fleet management?
• What is fleet management software?
• Fleet management templates
• Using Process Street for fleet management

Let’s start by making sure we’re all on the same page; what exactly is fleet management?
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This is a guest post by Rahul Varshneya, the co-founder and President of Arkenea. Rahul has been featured as a technology thought leader in numerous media channels such as Bloomberg TV, Forbes, HuffPost, Inc, among others.

Several organizations use a wide range of tools to execute and monitor their internal processes. These systems are interfaced by human agents who pass on the data output from one system as input to the next system in the pipeline.

Because of the non-automatic nature of manual execution, manual data entry work makes these processes slow and error-prone.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had these interfaces taken care of automatically?

That’s right, we are talking about Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – a transformational paradigm that optimizes such processes by automating repetitive, rule-driven tasks.

According to Forrester Research, RPA market revenue is expected to gross $1 Billion USD in 2019.

With RPA and by using RPA tools, your internal processes can be finished faster and more efficiently. It would free your agents from trivial data entry and data exchange tasks so you could deploy them to do more strategic process initiatives.

In this article, we at Process Street will present 5 best practices for RPA. We will then introduce our favorite RPA tools, so you can walk away with actionable robotically automated processes.

This article has been structured as the following:

• How does Robotic Process Automation eliminate tasks from structured environments?
• Software silos and how they affect your teams
• How to break silos with the implementation of Robotic Process Automation
• How to achieve exceptional results with Robotic Process Automation implementation
• RPA tools: Process Street’s top four RPA tools
• How you can use Process Street’s RPA tool capabilities

Let’s get started!

Note that RPA does not aim to eliminate jobs. It aims to reduce the burden of mundane and repetitive tasks of the existing staff so they can work on more strategic initiatives.
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Perhaps you’ve heard about checklists. Perhaps you know someone who uses checklist templates. Who knows, you may even have a simple checklist template or two you use in your own business.

Chances are, if you clicked this link, you’re interested in learning about simple checklist templates. Or specifically, how you can use them to run your business more efficiently.

You probably already know the basics – why checklists are useful, and the value of using a BPM software like Process Street. But you want more.

You want to know the essential checklists, the ones all the top CEOs and successful executives are using. You want ready-made checklists that will save you time, money, and confusion, and you want to learn about some of the immediate benefits of using simple checklist templates, straight from the mouths of those who have used them to run successful businesses of their own.

Well, you clicked to the right article. Here, I’ll be looking at an extensive correspondence between our content team and a number of successful SMB owners who just happen to be simple checklist template champions.

Whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, or otherwise, we’ve devised this article as a resource that will help you understand how you can use simple checklist templates in your business.

Breaking it down, we’ll look at:

• Benefits of simple checklist templates
• What simple checklist templates are successful business owners using?
• Simple checklist template essentials: Recommendations from top business owners
• How to build a simple checklist template with Process Street

But first, what is simple checklist template, anyway?
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