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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This is a guest post by Sarabeth Lewis, a freelance SaaS copywriter and UX writer based in Austin, Texas. Lewis regularly writes for AppSumo, a team of amazing folks who run insane lifetime deals on the best software tools in the world… while eating an impressive number of tacos.

Email. What a blessing (and a curse).

If you’re anything like me, you’ve let your inbox get away with far too many shenanigans. You want to take back control and organize your Gmail. But how?

At Process Street we understand that email is ubiquitous for working professionals. Despite its ubiquitous use, many complain email has a central flaw: a tendency to become your to-do list.

Am I wrong?

This usually occurs passively, inadvertently causing you to lose control of your own time.

When your day is commandeered by your inbox, it means that other people are controlling your calendar.

In this article, you will find out how to take back control and organize your Gmail. Click on the links below to jump to the relevant section, or scroll down to keep reading.

• Organize Gmail: Remove email distractions
• Organize Gmail: How to obtain inbox zero
• Organize Gmail with Kelly’s Gmail system, our 9 step process
• Organize Gmail: 2 more (optional) Gmail tips
• Organize your Gmail with Process Street
• Organize Gmail: Take it one step further with an automated email

Let’s get started.

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70% of all businesses fail within the first 10 years.

Business owners reading this: for every ten of you, 7 will fold.

Despite that morbid start, I begin this Process Street article looking at the operational audit. I will demonstrate how using an operational audit can refine, improve, and evolve your business operations, setting you up for business prosperity. Wouldn’t it be nice to alter the above stat to 100% business success?

A tall order but, as the Westlife song goes, Nothing is impossible – apologies if you are not a Westlife fan. I believe that optimized operational audits play a significant role in driving business success. In this article, I will explain why. You will also find out:

1. What an operational audit is
2. The benefits operational audits bring to Business
3. Operational audit best practices
4. How you can implement internal operational audits with Process Street. These will be recurring processes within your business

To jump to the relevant section, click on the links below. Alternatively, scroll down and read all to become an expert in the auditing world.

• Operational audit: What is an operational audit?
• Operational audit: What do operational auditors do?
• Operational audit: Best practices used by the experts
• Integrating operational audit best practices into your internal operational audit process
• Operational audit: Why you should use an audit checklist to conduct your internal operational audit
• Use Process Street and our audit checklists to conduct your internal operational audit

Let’s get started!

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Knowledge is power, but you need a system in place to harness that power effectively.

Everything that happens in your business depends on some kind of specialized knowledge, whether it’s new employee onboarding, dealing with customer requests, compliance issues, or marketing a new feature launch.

Your knowledge management system is the firm foundation upon which you build your business.

Despite this, statistics show that as many as 40% of employees do not utilize proper knowledge management solutions, and between 7-20% of their time is spent figuring out a problem from scratch when the solution already exists somewhere in the company.

These bad business practices cost Fortune 500 companies $31.5 billion each year.

How much money are you losing, and how much time are you wasting without a proper knowledge management system in place?

Knowledge management shares many fundamental principles with the idea of business process management (BPM), and as such it’s possible to use BPM software like Process Street to implement a powerful knowledge management system.

In this article, we’ll be looking at:

• What is a knowledge management system?
• Knowledge management system benefits
• How to build a knowledge management system
• Knowledge management software
• Using Process Street as a knowledge management system

Let’s start by understanding some basic principles of a knowledge management system.
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This is a guest post by Daniel Ndukwu. Daniel has extensive experience in digital marketing and is the Founder of KyLeads. There he helps business owners and publishers increase their leads and audience engagement with smart popups, interactive quizzes, and surveys.

In 2017, I had a brilliant idea.

Many of the tools for conversion rate optimization are point solutions. They make popups, landing pages, quizzes, surveys. Very few of them – if any – combine those functions into one.

I decided I would tackle the challenge by building a tool (now called KyLeads). It would allow people to create surveys, popups, and quizzes for lead generation and customer research.

After going through two development teams, rebuilding our user interface, and learning first-hand how hard it is to make software, we launched.

There was little fanfare and only a few customers when we started. But my team and I kept going. We knew it would be a long journey to success – and it’s paying off.

This article shares the best practices, tactics, and processes we used (and are still using) to improve our SaaS onboarding and grow our business into something spectacular.

Want to turbocharge your business’ onboarding successes and conversion rates in half the time?

Just read through the sections below to uncover these insider tips and tricks yourself:

• What is SaaS onboarding?
• What’s the importance of SaaS onboarding?
• Our top 5 SaaS onboarding best practices
• Use Process Street for SaaS onboarding!

Now, let’s get stuck in.

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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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Microsoft Visio is the industry standard for business process modeling, but you might want something different. Something a little more… agile. Just because it’s the most widely used, doesn’t mean it’s the best.

The main reason it’s so widely used is that it’s packaged with Office 365 and often comes pre-installed with enterprise tech suites.

If you’re tired of Visio’s lack of integration, lack of macOS compatibility, and sky-high price point, then you should consider investigating one of the many Visio alternatives out there (like Process Street!) and asking yourself what they can do for you.

There are a lot of options for different use cases; in this article, we’ll take a look at some of the best Visio alternatives and talk about why they might be a better choice.

Here’s a breakdown of the article:

• What is Microsoft Visio?
• What should business process modeling software be good at?
• Best Visio alternatives
• Using Process Street to implement business process modeling

You’re probably all-too-familiar with Microsoft Visio, but for the sake of clarity, let’s start with a quick overview.
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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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Duties. Deliverables. Deadlines.

No matter if an employee is working as part of a tiny startup based in the CEO’s basement, or a multinational company with offices across the globe, there are important tasks that each and every employee needs to knock out the park.

But how can companies ensure their employees can complete tasks effectively? And that employees aren’t creating a backlog of work for themselves, which could decrease overall productivity by up to 68%?

Answer: An employee task list.

At least, that’s what countless top, thriving companies have told us after we asked them about their task list and checklist habits.

In this post – which is the next part in Process Street‘s series investigating how, why, and in what ways successful businesses use lists for their workflows – I’ll deep dive into the nitty-gritty of employee task lists. Plus, you’ll get the exclusive opportunity to discover the never-seen-before findings from our in-depth research.

Just read through the following sections:

• What is an employee task list?
• What jobs require an employee task list?
• How is an employee task list useful?
• Why marketing teams around the globe utilize employee task lists
• Employee task list best practices: Crushing duties & deadlines
• Use Process Street to create a superpowered employee task list!

However, before delving into our findings, I’ll first define exactly what an employee task list is.

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Guest post by Harry Southworth, a professional writer and editor.

An ecommerce strategy is the coordinated plan for attracting a defined customer, converting demand into profitable orders, delivering the promise, and earning the next purchase. The best ecommerce books build that plan with lessons from entrepreneurship, positioning, customer experience, analytics, psychology, and process design.