82% of companies are still spending billions on remaining paper-based companies, with 1/3 upping their paper usage in recent years.

Why, oh why are businesses still relying on a technology that was invented around 100BC when we have entered an era of artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and digitized documentation?

If you want effective Enterprise Document Management (EDM) strategies, you need to scrap the paper and go paperless.

A bold statement, but a statement that is not unfounded.

• Paper is costly – costing an average of ~$8 billion annually in management.
• Paper is wasteful – paper usage does not support the global paradigm shift towards vital sustainability efforts.
• Paper is difficult to manage – workers spend almost half their time looking for information stored in paper documents.

What you need are digitized methods to store important business information. What you need is an electronic way to manage this.

What you need is a digitized Enterprise Document Management system, and we at Process Street are here to help.

Find out what Enterprise Document Management is, and why Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS’s) serve as good EDM tools. We present to you our top 5 EDMS tools which you can use alongside Process Street for ultimate document control.

Ready to terminate your paper towers? Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section, alternatively scroll down to read all we at Process Street have to say about digital Enterprise Document Management systems.

• What is Enterprise Document Management (EDM)?
• Enterprise Document Management (EDM): The document management system you need to use and why
• Electronic Document Management System (EDMS): A 3-stepped process for document control
• Our Top 5 EDMS tools
• Process Street: Optimizing your internal workflows
• Enterprise Document Management: Audit your EDMS with Process Street
• Process Street: The ultimate EDMS counterpart

Let’s get started!
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Let’s face it.

Delivering stellar services to customers and clients can be tough.

And with villains such as poor communication, stress, and human error constantly rearing their ugly heads, it makes that job even harder.

In fact, a study by Quantum Workplace found that more than 80% of people thought miscommunication happened very frequently, frequently, or occasionally in the workplace, while Identity Guard uncovered that the average American employee makes 118 mistakes per year.

So that mistakes are quashed, miscommunication is thwarted, and that everyone is on the same page so the objectives, targets, and goals defined in your service level agreements (SLA) can be upheld, an OLA is the answer.

An OLA is to the SLA what Robin is to Batman. Superboy to Superman. Chewbacca to Han Solo. And by reading through the following sections in this Process Street article, you’ll discover why an OLA makes for a kickass side-kick:

• What is an operational level agreement (OLA)?
• What’s the difference?: OLA vs SLA
• Operational level agreement examples (templates)
• Important tips for creating and writing OLAs
• How Process Street can help you with all things OLA!

Now, don your cape and let’s fly through this post! ⚡️
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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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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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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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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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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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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.