In our previous post – What is an SLA? How to Use Service-Level Agreements for Success – we gave you the complete lowdown on SLAs.

From learning what an SLA is to why you need one, and what goes in an SLA to the different types of SLAs available, you learned about the incredible usefulness of SLAs without the high-level, confusing baloney.

It piqued your interest, right?

Perhaps you even thought about making a shiny SLA template yourself, but realized creating an SLA is not exactly an easy endeavor.

Don’t worry.

I too know the difficulty involved with creating SLAs – but they’re needed. They’re there to establish trust and accountability, and at a time when 10 out of 15 companies are rapidly losing the trust of others, creating SLAs for your customers and clients will put you at a great advantage.

That’s why, in this post, I’ll be providing you with additional tips and tricks for creating, editing, and using SLA templates. You’ll also get your hands on easy-to-use Process Street SLA templates, from which you can create an infinite number of SLAs without hardly any effort (I’ll be focusing on one in particular)!

Just read through the sections below to get started:

• Free SLM and SLA templates
• What is the SLA definition?
• How is a service level agreement created?
• Using Process Street’s service level agreement template process
• SLA example templates to use as inspiration
• How Process Street can aid you with further SLA management!

Let’s get rocking and rolling.

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Deadlines.

Meetings.

Presentations.

As an employee and business owner, your agenda is jam-packed full of to-dos. It can sometimes be difficult to stay afloat. This is why we at Process Street have created this article to make your working life a lot easier.

We’re going to look at making checklists for the effective management of your work.

We asked business owners and employees across the globe: What tips or tricks would you give someone for making checklists?

We gathered our responses, sieved out significant commonalities, and wrapped up our findings to produce this article.

Click on a subheader to jump to any section, or scroll down to read a full in-depth account on making checklists.

• ‎Making checklists: Why use checklists?
• Making checklists: Tip 1 – Split up your large projects
• Making checklists: Tip 2 – Keep your checklists manageable
• Making checklists: Tip 3 – Group your tasks
• Making checklists: Tip 4 – Keep a record
• Making checklists: Tip 5 – Regularly update your checklists
• More tips for your checklist templates
• How to make superpowered checklists using Process Street

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Services, services, services.

We seem to be in a world of managed services.

Everyone’s outsourcing nowadays. And when they’re not outsourcing, they’re insourcing in an outsourced way.

It’s all very confusing.

That’s why we’ve decided to break down the core document which tends to regulate and organize this kind of service provision: the humble service-level agreement (SLA).

Service-level agreements, amongst other things, bolster trust in and between organizations – making it clear what needs to be done, to what standard, and when.

Trust is a hugely important thing in business. Accenture’s Competitive Agility Index found:

following a drop in trust, a company’s index score drops 2 points on average, negatively impacting revenue growth by 6% and EBITDA by 10% on average.

One of the main ways to keep trust alive in your business is to know what is expected of people and to hold them to it. Enforce reliability.

SLAs are one mechanism to help you in that battle.

In this Process Street article we’ll answer the following questions:

• Free SLM and SLA templates
• What is a service-level agreement (SLA)?
• Why do you need a service-level agreement?
• What are the different types of SLA?
• What is in a service-level agreement?
• What kinds of companies use an SLA?
• What are some SLA examples?
• What are the alternatives to SLAs?
• How you can use SLAs with Process Street

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You’re cooking for corporate success, but how do you know when it’s time to add a little sustainability into the mix?

Sustainability is the key ingredient, like the spice in your curry, or the sugar in your cake, that brings long-term economic prosperity.

So before you fire up on all cylinders, consider this: companies that adopted environmental, social and governance policies in the 1990s have long since outperformed those that didn’t today.

If you have read some of Process Street‘s previous articles, such as How You Can Create a Sustainable Business for Long-Term Business Succes, you will learn that there is a strong, unbreakable tie between our environment, society, and the economy. It is with this undeniable relationship, that GRI Standards reporting came about.

GRI Standards will help you produce a sustainability report, and by doing so, you are taking a huge leap towards securing business sustainability and cooking up long-term corporate success.

In this article, I will explain why GRI Standards reporting is important, what GRI Standards are, and how you can implement GRI Standards for the production of your sustainability report today. You are provided with free and ready to use templates for implementation of the three universal GRI Standards reports.

• GRI Standards 101: Foundation 2016 Checklist Template
• GRI Standards 102: General Disclosures 2016 Checklist Template
• GRI Standards 103: Management Approach 2016 Checklist Template

Ready to become a GRI Standards expert and start implementing GRI Standards into your business today?

Let’s read on!

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If you’re manufacturing food, drinks, or medicine, you know you have a sea of regulations and standards which you need to hit and adhere to.

You knew that starting out.

But it does leave you with two questions:

1. What are the regulations and standards that I should adhere to?
2. How do I get my organization to run in an effective manner so that we consistently adhere?

Lots of companies are very good at asking the first question, but the second sometimes gets overlooked.

This is how we end up with malpractice and lawsuits and all kinds of bad things.

You don’t just have to know what the standards are, or intend to reach those standards, but you have to consistently hit those standards in order to be the successful safe business you want to be.

That’s why in this Process Street article we’ll be looking at:

• What is CGMP? Current Good Manufacturing Practices explained
• What are the current Good Manufacturing Practices?
• What is a Quality Management System and how does it help CGMP?
• How Process Street can help you build your Quality Management System

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I moved house not too long ago.

Now, I’ve always been a pretty terrible record keeper in my own life.

To remedy this I tried the hoarder technique. If I thought something was even remotely important, I’d throw it in a box file and vow to come back to it one day in the future.

It was only when I came to moving, and thought I’d try to Marie Kondo my crap away, that I dug out all my box files and the piles of messy paper inside them.

I’ll be really honest with you – it’s not an approach to records management that I would recommend.

Your business probably creates exponentially more records than I do, so you certainly can’t use an unthought-out approach to records management either.

That’s why we’ve decided to take some of the basics of records management, explain them, and give you a series of actionable ways to get started taking control over the lifecycles of records in your company.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at:

• What is records management?
• Why is records management important?
• The 5 key steps to records management
• How to build a records management process

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Implementing an EMS, or any of the ISO 14000 standards used to be a confusing and intimidating process.

What’s more, in the past, companies that wanted to conform to and implement standards for environmental and quality management systems would be faced with the task of building out huge, complex manuals, with lengthy processes for changing how each task and procedure in the business was approached.

The result of this kind of EMS implementation would often be a huge, labyrinthine system of paper forms; slow to implement, difficult to navigate, and a nightmare update in tandem with real, changing business needs.

However, things changed with the recent ISO 2015 updates.

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Building a solid product strategy is often thought of as a complex challenge and many companies fail to approach it systematically.

Other teams sometimes operate with a lean methodology and think this excuses them from developing a strong product strategy to guide development.

It doesn’t.

A solid product strategy is an important part of building a functional and coherent product and it shouldn’t be overlooked.

In this Process Street article, we will avoid long explanations and unnecessary detail, cutting straight to the point to give you a clear and actionable understanding of product strategy.

And we have provided an actionable product strategy template you can use in your business!

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ISO 9001 is an international standard for defining a quality management system (QMS). It outlines various criteria (or standards) to define quality management principles such as focusing on the customer, optimizing leadership and management within the organization, improving and fine-tuning internal processes, and general methods of continuous improvement.

Let’s break down each of the components of and ISO 9001 certification.

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I have a riddle for you:

What has four sides, often goes missing, comes from trees, and can be expensive to reproduce?

I’ll give you a hint.

It wastes up to 40% of on-the-job time, and about $120 billion per year in the US alone.

Need another?

Around 7.5% of them will be lost or misplaced each year (about one lost every 12 seconds), and for each that gets lost you’re looking at a loss of between $350 to $700 in employee time.

Did you get it yet?

Condescending sarcasm aside, I am of course talking about paper forms. But this article isn’t about paper forms, per se; it’s about how you can get rid of paper forms in your business with form automation software.

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