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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“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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Whether the number of possible business processes is finite or infinite is debatable. Needless to say, there are a lot.

You can start with a broad, complex discipline like operations, mapping out the general, high-level process, and go on to create a vast amount of sub-processes that fall under the same area.

How granular you go is really up to you, and depends on what is most suitable for the way you conduct business.

There are, however, a number of processes that are absolutely essential to efficiently running any kind of business, regardless of size, industry, or location.

Processes that, without clear documentation and management, will cause bottlenecks that stifle growth or at worst, force an organization to close its doors.

In this post, we’re going to be looking at what we, here at Process Street, have identified as the top 10 business processes that you should care about and focus on continuously optimizing.

These are the big dogs. The greatest hits.

Each process will be paired with at least one fully customizable template that will help you get started or evaluate and refine your current processes depending on what stage you are at in mapping out and implementing your own.

My hope is that you will not only extract valuable insight from this article, but also find ways to apply the templates that have been provided in a way that is practical and useful for your team or organization as a whole.

Let’s get into it.

Oh, and bear in mind, these are in no particular order.

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Process mapping is a useful tool for what can be summed up as “seeing the big picture and little pictures at the same time”.

That may sound silly to you, but that’s really what it is.

The primary benefit achieved from mapping out your business processes is that you can accurately evaluate each of the steps needed to complete a certain workflow, while understanding exactly how each of them interacts with one another and contributes to the process as a whole.

This ability to evaluate all aspects of a process helps managers identify constraints, opportunities for improvement, and formulate strategies to implement changes without disrupting day-to-day work.

But how do you go about ensuring that the time and effort you put into constructing these maps translates into improved performance?

That’s the question we’ll be tackling in this post.

Before doing so, however, we must acknowledge that there is a huge range of complexity when it comes to methods for process mapping. If you are a small organization it can be as simple as drawing it out on a whiteboard, whereas enterprises use sophisticated mapping software tools like Appian and Lucidchart.

This point regarding complexity and different kinds of process maps leads us to another important sub-topic that needs to be addressed early on – the difference between process mapping and process modeling.

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On September 23, 1999, NASA’s $193 million Mars Climate Orbiter was obliterated 57km above the surface of Mars.

What caused such a catastrophic event? Badly implemented processes.

“The problem here was not the error; it was the failure of NASA’s systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes, to detect the error. That’s why we lost the spacecraft.”
—Edward Weiler, NASA associate administrator for space science

Despite all of NASA’s precautions, preparatory research and technical developments, the deviation from standard procedure for making sure their units were consistently imperial or metric was what resulted in the disastrous calculation error responsible for the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, and in turn huge amounts of time, money, and material resources.

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There are numerous features of Process Street that make the platform as useful as it is for managing recurring workflows and processes.

Beyond the ability to create process checklists, features such as form fields, rich media, conditional logic, real-time tracking, and the ability to set up automation with 1000+ other applications, provide a huge amount of value.

In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at one feature in particular: form fields.

An essential component of our software, form fields allow users to safely store important data that can then be automatically passed to and from other tools in your tech stack.

The goal of the post is to show you how you can name your form fields so that they are as effective as possible when used by other team members, as well as suppliers and customers who may be interacting with your checklists.

First, I’ll run through a brief overview of form fields, the various different types, and what value they provide. Then we’ll take a quick look at some typical use cases that will give you a better idea of when they are used, before going through a set of naming best practices with examples.

Let’s get started.

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Have you ever wished you could get some of those pesky work tasks done more easily while on the move, or out-and-about? Those routine tasks and emails that take so much time out of your day, that you would give an arm and a leg to be able to automate?

Or, picture this: you easily send a quick follow-up email, record meeting notes in real time, create new projects, send surveys, schedule meetings, and much more by simply talking to Siri.

You can do all of this and more with Shortcuts for iOS 12 in combination with Siri and Process Street, using the power of Zapier integrations.

Shortcuts, formerly known as Workflow, puts Siri in the control seat of your business workflows, with more power and usefulness than ever before. Using custom phrases recorded and added to Siri’s library of voice gestures, you can trigger a series of actions across multiple apps.

There are two ways to use Shortcuts. The best option is the Shortcuts app itself, which is where you can create your own workflows from scratch. The app also comes with a gallery of suggested shortcuts curated by Apple. Separate from this, Siri will recommend shortcuts based on your daily iPhone activity. You can see these in Settings under Siri & Search.

Here’s a quick list of all of the ideas I’ll be covering in this post, before we dive in:

• 1. Dictate meeting notes straight to your CRM
• 2. Send an electronic contract when timing is crucial
• 3. Master your calendar in an instant
• 4. Kickstart your client onboarding process
• 5. Get paid faster by sending your invoices ASAP
• 6. Assign your team members on the go
• 7. Grab and archive snapshots of your working screen-space during a technical audit
• 8. Jump straight back into your drafts, anywhere, any time
• 9. Dictate an email to your assistant
• 10. Manage your tasks with a dynamic to-do list

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Universal Modeling Language (UML) is a way of visualizing a software program using a collection of diagrams. That is perhaps the simplest way to define it.

If you’re looking for a full-winded definition, here it is:

“The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was created to forge a common, semantically and syntactically rich visual modeling language for the architecture, design, and implementation of complex software systems both structurally and behaviorally.” – Lucidchart, What is Unified Modeling Language

UML has many advantages including flexibility, an abundance of tools, and the capacity to model systems from both a structural and behavioral perspective.

Nevertheless, it can sometimes be overwhelming.

A focus on simplicity is, therefore, essential to not only creating actionable diagrams, but also to avoid pulling your hair out in the process!

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The importance of efficient purchase order management

Effectively managing purchase orders is a critical component of any business with vendor relationships. And yet, according to the founder & COO of Procurify, Kenneth Loi:

“Many organizations unwisely forego purchase orders because they perceive the paperwork to be a hassle that slows things down.”

He’s right. Paperwork is a hassle and does slow things down. However, this is not a good enough reason to forego purchase orders, hence the word “unwisely”.

From creating a requisition to gaining approval and receiving an invoice from the vendor, there are up to 7 documents involved in the purchasing cycle. That is a lot to keep track of for a single purchase.

And this only gets more complex as a business grows.

Maintaining a paper-based system at the enterprise level is virtually impossible. For smaller companies, it’s do-able, just incredibly inefficient.

The frustration and inefficiency that comes with managing piles of paperwork is no longer an unavoidable obstacle to overcome. By establishing an automated purchase order workflow, you can centralize documentation, seamlessly track progress in real-time, and shorten purchasing cycles.