Consumer Reports publishes an annual reliability survey, which includes data on over 470,000 cars.

In this report, owners of Tesla’s Model 3 experienced a number of problems, including chassis hardware, paint and trim related faults, indicative of a build quality that fell far shorter than expected standards set across the automotive industry. The Model 3 represents Tesla’s first real attempt at a mass-market electric vehicle, and the issues surrounding its launch created much frustration and controversy among electric vehicle enthusiasts.

This lack of quality assurance has lost at least one major $5 million order of Model 3 vehicles from a rental company, in relation to problems with the service and performance of previously purchased vehicles.

In an email, NextMove wrote:

“Tesla Model 3 vehicles, which NextMove was supposed to take over after payment and only a short examination, sometimes had serious defects: defective tires, paint and body damages, defective charge controllers, wrong wiring harnesses or missing emergency call buttons. Such quality defects would have endangered the safety of the customers and the profitability of NextMove.”

Stefan Moeller, Managing Director of NextMove, went on to say:

“We had to insist on compliance with general quality standards and processes in order to protect our renters and our business model.”

Why did Tesla have so many problems? Crucially, Tesla made the decision to deliver the product to market and sort out the issues later.

Basically, they didn’t have a strong enough system for managing quality.

We call these Quality Management Systems (QMS) – and they work.

The rest of the auto-industry follows a specific quality management system structure. It’s called ISO/TS 16949:2009 and it’s a variant of ISO 9001.

People follow quality management systems for various reasons; they improve quality first and foremost. But they also have a positive impact on the bottom line.

The return on investment (ROI) of a quality management system is typically impressive:

As a guide, a recent study undertaken through the American Society for Quality (ASQ) showed that for every $1 spent on your QMS, you could expect to see an additional $6 in revenue, a $16 reduction in costs, and a $3 increase in profits. On average, they saw that quality management reduced costs by 4.8% – ASQ

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at how ISO 9001 can be used to assure quality control across all types of organizations, with benefits like improved company performance, higher demand for products, and a competitive advantage towards increasing market share.

What we’ll cover:

• ISO 9001: Free templates!
• What is ISO 9001? A simple introduction
• Anatomy of ISO 9001: 2015 for Quality Management
• Quality management: What is it & why does it matter?
• ISO 9001 for continuous improvement
• Agile ISO
• What does it mean to be ISO 9001 certified?
• ISO 9001 audit
• Implement ISO 9001 with Process Street
• Related ISO standards

For the uninitiated, what is ISO 9001, as simply as possible?
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In recent years, the rate of commercial fleet driving accidents in the US has increased by about 20%.

The fleet management industry has responded in turn with a re-emphasis on the importance of vehicle and driver safety, chiefly due to the preventable nature of many of these vehicular accidents.

Fleet management systems have grown more and more complex; far beyond the basic cc tracking system of its past.

Today, more vehicle-dependent businesses are implementing these systems to improve the monitoring of their drivers and vehicles, encourage safer driving habits, and facilitate better company-wide transparency.

If your company is managing a large fleet of hundreds or thousands of vehicles, a fleet management system is key to keeping track of everything related to your employees and assets.

Managing your fleet without a system in place inherently leaves room for potential complications and human error, even if your fleet is smaller in size. For example, if a driver gets into an accident, you may run into problems when filing an insurance claim, or it might be difficult to quickly reach your driver to obtain an ETA for a customer.

Fleet management systems are designed to mitigate these potential issues and help strengthen your daily processes, making them more efficient and organized than ever before.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be covering:

• What is fleet management?
• What is a fleet management system (FMS)?
• Key responsibilities of a fleet manager
• Advantages of fleet management systems
• Fleet management templates
• How to use Process Street for your fleet management system

Let’s start with the basics.
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This is a guest post by Kristen McCabe, a global marketer. She has marketing experience extending from Australia to Chicago with expertise in both B2B and B2C industries, specializing in content, SEO, and events. Kristen spends her time outside of work acting, learning nature photography and joining in the #instadog fun with her Pug/JackRussell, Bella.

We have one reason marketers host and sponsor events.

Whether you want to get more leads, increase brand awareness, or meet with current customers to upsell and build customer lifetime value, marketing events ultimately leads to the same destination: increased revenue for a greater Return On Investment (ROI).

Despite this common goal, according to The Event Marketing Evolution, a research report by the Harvard Business Review, only 23% of companies can track event ROI.

Notice here that we say can rather than do track ROI, making these results even more concerning and surprising.

So our question to is this: How will you ensure you’re in the elite group of marketers who:

• Can track the success of their event sponsorship?
• Regularly track event results, and improve their strategy as needed?

In this Process Street article we will answer these two questions, and walk you through the steps that ensure you aren’t throwing your previous marketing dollars down the drain.

To start at the beginning, we find our selves before the day of the event.

With that, let’s not waste any more time, and get straight to it. Click on the subheaders below to jump to the relevant section. Alternatively, scroll down to read all.

• Event ROI: What it is and how to measure it
• Event planning: The pre-event strategy and planning stage
• Event partners: Your internal and external event partners
• Event ROI: Choosing an event that obtains a strong ROI, must-ask questions
• Event data: Capturing event data
• After the event: Measuring and building your success after the event
• Marketing events with Process Street

Let’s begin! Continue Reading

When defining, documenting, and delivering services to customers, it can be a little difficult (read: incredibly taxing) to keep on top of everything.

As Philipp Unterharnscheidt and Axel Kieninger at the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute both say:

“IT services supporting business operations are an increasingly critical factor for business success today (Guldentops 2003). The management of service quality, which is the central objective of Service Level Management (SLM), however remains a major challenge for many companies.” – Philipp Unterharnscheidt and Axel Kieninger, Service Level Management – Challenges and their Relevance from the Customers’ Point of View

To help companies keep on top of things – and manage their services, service levels, and SLAs and OLAs masterfully – there’s service level management.

This may be the point where you’re thinking “But what, exactly, is service level management? What are the benefits of it? The best practices so it’s done properly? And how would Process Street even help with service level management?”

Worry no more, reader. You’ve come to the right place.

Just read through these sections to get to grips with service level management:

• What is service level management (SLM)?
• The benefits of service level management
• Service level management best practices
• Use Process Street for SLM (and creating your OLA and SLA agreements)!

Let’s dive straight in. ⬇️

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Process Street is a 100% remote company. We have been from day one.

But our CEO Vinay Patankar has been remote longer than that. Process Street is Vinay’s third remote company, meaning 10 years of running companies remotely.

At the time of writing, we have around 50 employees across multiple continents and it’s working so well for us that we’ve just sealed our Series A funding round from Accel, Atlassian, and Salesforce Ventures.

We thought now would be a good time to do a deep dive into Vinay’s thoughts on remote work and why his experience of it has kept him remote.

For this Process Street article, we sat down with Vinay to ask him 4 key questions, which we’ve provided links to below:

• Were you distributed from day one?
• How many employees do you have and in how many countries?
• What are the biggest challenges of having a distributed team?
• What are the biggest advantages?

Vinay has also produced a short video series of key things to learn when working in or running a remote team. You can check these videos out in the section below: Continue Reading

Can you prove your team’s performance?

How do you know for certain that nothing is being missed?

The answer is simple; you perform an internal audit.

We here at Process Street know how difficult it can be to keep track of your internal workings. Short of documenting and tracking everything (which can be a hassle) it’s easy to lose track of the risks posed to your organization.

That’s ignoring how hard it can be to track whether your teams are performing their duties correctly.

That’s why this post will dive into everything you need to know about internal audits. These are practices that let you get an objective assessment of various elements of your company, such as this ISO 9001 process.

We’ll cover:

• What is an internal audit?
• Types of audits
• Benefits of internal audits
• Internal auditing examples
• Use Process Street to run your internal audits

Let’s dive in.
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ISO 9001; you may have heard of it. You may be somewhat afraid of it. And, if you’re reading this article, chances are you’re probably at least somewhat confused about how to actually implement it.

It’s possible you even Googled something like “what is ISO 9001?”. Perhaps you felt you knew at one point, but the important bits never really stuck.

Well, with the 2015 updates to a whole range of ISO standards, it’s a lot less scary.

Before now, if you wanted to implement any ISO standard, you’d have to undertake a lengthy process involving unwieldy paper manuals and cumbersome bureaucratic procedure.

In short, ISO 9001 was hardly agile.

Now, you have far more flexibility to implement ISO 9001 the way that works for you best; with BPM software like Process Street to make things streamlined and simple.

This is why we’re presenting you with this handy overview of ISO 9001, including all of the essentials you need to get started.

We’ll cover how to combine structured compliance with the rapid process improvement of a startup, including:

• Free ISO 9001 Templates
• What is ISO 9001? The most popular QMS standard
• Benefits of implementing ISO 9001
• Quality management with ISO 9001: Key principles
• ISO 9001 certification: Is it necessary?
• Agile ISO 9001 in 5 simple steps
• More ISO resources

Before we dive in, here’s some free templates to help you hit the ground running!
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In the words of Jean Rostand, a French Biologist, and Philosopher:

“The obligation to endure gives us the right to know” – Jean Rostand, Silent Spring

Greenwashing, as a marketing tactic, thwarts our right to know as consumers. Unfortunately for us, 98% of green-labeled products are greenwashed.

Greenwashing is unethical. Greenwashing is risky. Greenwashing needs to be prevented.

You can think of this Process Street article as an antidote to greenwash. We give you the information you need to identify and stop greenwash in its tracks. We do this because greenwash is not good for you as a consumer, and it is not good for you as a business owner or employee.

Like Rostand, we at Process Street believe everybody has a right to know how green the products and services they purchase are. In this article, we provide information that will give you back this right where greenwash blots it out.

Paint strippers at the ready, it’s time to peel away the dross. Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Greenwashing: Greenwashing definition
• Sustainability templates to help you create a more sustainable business
• Environmentalism: Fashion or passion?
• Greenwashing: A troubling evolution in the corporate world
• Greenwashing examples
• Greenwashing: You have to spot it to stop it
• Greenwash: Green companies and how you can be one

Let’s jump right to it!
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If you hear the term “fleet management” and assume its only importance is to keep track of your fleet and the location of your vehicles and drivers, then you’ve assumed wrong.

Over the past several years, fleet management software has evolved beyond the basic tracking system most people expect from it and the number of business owners choosing to implement it is growing every day.

Fleet management may not be challenging if your company has only a few vehicles, but if you have hundreds or thousands of vehicles, you’ll need to implement fleet management software, because the manual labor needed would be completely out of hand.

Managing your fleet manually leaves a lot of room for potential issues. To name just a few, you might struggle to get in contact with your drivers when necessary or, if an accident occurs, you’ll run into more complications when filing an insurance claim.

Using fleet management software alleviates these problems and helps avoid any new problems that may arise.
In this article, we’ll cover:

• What is fleet management?
• What is fleet management software?
• Benefits of fleet management software
• Key features of fleet management software
• Tips for choosing the right fleet management software for your company
• Best fleet management software
• How to use Process Street to streamline your fleet management

Before we dive into the different fleet management software mentioned in this article, here’s a quick list of useful fleet management templates:

• Facility inspection checklist
• Forklift inspection checklist
• Inventory management process
• ISO container inspection checklist
• Order fulfillment
• Order processing checklist
• Vehicle inspection checklist
• Warehouse safety checklist
• Scheduled maintenance notification
• Vendor management: Supplier evaluation
• Vendor management: Contract negotiation

If you’re not sure what a Process Street template looks like, check it out here:

Read on for more tips on how to use Process Street to streamline your fleet management operations! Continue Reading

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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