It’s no secret that documenting and analyzing your business processes is vital to creating a healthy business.

Yet, despite the benefits of bpm software and business process mapping being readily talked about, value stream mapping doesn’t get the same share of attention.

This is a mistake.

Value stream mapping is just as, if not more, important to reducing waste and increasing your business’ efficiency than standard process mapping.

That’s why I’ll be showing you how to make a value stream map from start to finish, with no wasted time and no needlessly confusing terms.

Let’s go.

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Before we dive into the world of ISO audits, if you’re savvy on ISO audits and are just here for a complete, actionable, and totally free ISO 9004:2018 self-audit checklist, you can grab that here:

Otherwise, read on.

What is an ISO audit?

An audit in the context of ISO standards is the process of making sure a certain business system or feature, whether a process itself, a quality management or business process management system, or a product, is compliant to certain requirements.

The requirements by which the compliance of an organization are assessed could be defined by certain ISO family standards, or they could reflect the need to analyze certain performance indicators or business needs.

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We’ve all felt overwhelmed by advertisements and burned out by peer pressure. Most of us also want to influence people’s decisions to try and get a certain outcome.

That’s where nudge theory comes in.

Less intrusive than advertising and so widely applicable that it’s seen implementation in everything from architecture to politics and charity drives, nudge theory is a great way to present choices to your audience in a way that subtly promotes the one you want them to make.

So, stick around to learn what nudge theory is all about and see how you can use it to influence decisions without making your audience feel like they’re being forced into it.

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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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This article is a guest post from Wendy Dessler; a super-connector who helps businesses find their audience online through outreach, partnerships, and networking. She frequently writes about the latest advancements in digital marketing and focuses her efforts on developing customized blogger outreach plans.

It’s easy to check a few boxes when it comes to backgrounds and ethnicities, but does that really equal inclusivity?

Let’s face it, these are conflicted times. Everything seems to be coming to a head, and as workforce leaders, we need to make it a priority to make sure people feel valued.

Diversity is more than just a buzzword.

Diverse companies have a better reputation, and they also reap the endless benefits of having people from a variety of cultures, experiences, and backgrounds. Even if you don’t think inclusivity and diversity is a real issue today, it is.

An unfortunate 44 percent of managers are “too busy” to bother with diversity initiative. Including more people and encouraging a variety of perspectives does take time. It’s not always easy. It’s a team effort in many ways, yet it’s so essential to success today.

It’s not all about diversity. It’s also about building a culture of respect and appreciation.

We’ve all experienced working somewhere where we didn’t feel welcome. Maybe the leaders were too harsh and demanding. Maybe the hours were ridiculous. These jobs aren’t worth keeping, and they cause employees to feel undervalued.

You work hard to bring the best talent into your company. Don’t you want those individuals to feel excited about where they work? Believe it or not, it’s hard to find top talent today. According to the ManpowerGroup Talent Shortage research, 45 percent of employers across the globe struggle to find the skills they need. This is the highest in over a decade.

It’s time for your company to thrive thanks to different perspectives, skills, and personalities. Give your top performing employees a reason to love working at your organization.

If you’re ready to create an inclusive environment built for thriving, keep reading this Process Street article to explore the top 3 steps for cultivating diversity, inclusivity, and more.

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You can’t earn €38.8 billion in annual revenue by stumbling through your processes.

Specifically, the IKEA supply chain is the glue that holds the company together and allows them to flourish.

From their suppliers through to the product in-store, the supply chain is set up and managed in a way that reduces costs at every stage, makes the products more appealing to customers, and makes the brand as a whole seem more appealing.

It’s genius, really.

So let me show you how they do it.

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Modern business is a fast paced game and there are always new ways you can discover to improve your operations and output.

One of the easiest and simplest ways to improve the day to day running of your business is to supply your team with better tools.

With the array of modern SaaS products available on the market there are specialized tools for a host of use cases.

We use Close.io for our sales team, Intercom for customer support, and Process Street for our business process management throughout the company.

But if you’re a department within a larger company, or a team within a department, how do you convince top management and finance to sign off on a new software product to boost your team’s performance?

In this article, we’re going to give you a step by step guide of how to make that happen. Including:

• What is a purchase requisition?
• The difficulty of bureaucracy
• 3 important factors to convince finance
• How to write a proposal for a new software purchase requisition
• Create or improve a purchase requisition process

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You have probably used Linux today — especially if you don’t have an iPhone. And if you browsed the web today, there’s a big chance that the website you visited was served by Linux, too.

Linux is an operating system, but unlike software like Microsoft Windows and macOS, Linux was developed by a self-organized community of volunteers.

Over time, with the effort of over 10,000 developers and evolving processes to manage the scale of work, the Linux kernel has grown to over 20,000,000 lines of code in total. It forms the stable foundation for…

• Every Android phone and tablet on the planet
• 66% of the world’s servers
• 100% of the top 500 supercomputers

This technology didn’t come from an orchestrated team with a thick policy book and layers of management. It came from a few carefully-chosen and culturally-embedded policies, and a shared mission.

In this post, I look at how a technology so essential, complex and important could have been produced so effectively without traditional management structure. But first…

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Writing perfect processes is a dream all Process Street users share.

But a perfect process isn’t necessarily a process where all the steps work perfectly all the way through.

In real life, processes come up against external forces and unforeseen circumstances. A perfect process doesn’t have to predict all these external influences in advance; it needs to be able to adapt to them in real time as they arise.

Fortunately, there’s a concept for this: Process Flexibility.

Process flexibility helps keep our processes working even when everything else is going wrong.

In this article, we’re going to outline what process flexibility is and the main approaches to managing it:

• What is process flexibility?
• What are the main approaches to process flexibility?
• Flexibility by design
• Flexibility by deviation
• Flexibility by underspecification
• Flexibility by change
• How Process Street is designed for agility

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We always seem to be caught up in a never-ending mission to make our businesses better.

You have to ride out crises, fight through external problems, and still improve your performance week on week, quarter on quarter, year on year.

So how do we approach this improvement to get the most from it?

The key is about making improvement part of the daily process.

This approach falls under the umbrella of continuous improvement; what Toyota call Kaizen.

This is the art of taking a million steps forward. Compounding every success and safeguarding against every failure.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Why Kaizen is important
• What are the other Toyota Production System concepts?
• Things to consider when implementing Kaizen.
• How Samsung use Kaizen selectively to optimize production

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