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.
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:
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…
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…
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:
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:
The following is a guest post from Ryan Gould, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services at Elevation Marketing. An expert search, social and content marketer, Ryan leads Elevation Marketing’s digital strategy department, helping brands achieve their business goals, such as improving sales and market share, by developing integrated marketing strategies distinguished by research, storytelling, engagement and conversion.
Without software, you’d be hand-writing purchase orders, using a Rolodex for a CRM, and doing your newsletters via smoke signal.
Alright, maybe that last one is a little far-fetched, but there’s no denying that in the business world, technology is absolutely necessary and enables amazing things.
…But not everyone on your team gets enthusiastic about the prospect of learning a new tool. Even if that tool will help them improve productivity, do a better job, and escape the white-collar equivalent of hard manual labor.
Your goal when rolling out software is always the same: to help your business improve operations, boost efficiency, and enable sales. These days that means staying up to date on technological trends as well.
Deciding which tool is right for you will always hinge on fundamentals, like whether it can automate your vendor payments, purchase orders, employee onboarding, lead management, etc. However, there are other considerations, such as whether your solution integrates with cloud software and is responsive on mobile devices.
But, even after you’ve selected the solution perfect for your operation and your employees – after all the sales demos, comparison docs, and review reading – you’ll find it’s that the human element that trips you up.
The following is a guest post from Brett Farmiloe. Brett is the CEO of digital marketing company, Markitors, and advisor to career resource, Organizational Leadership Degrees. He is a regular contributor to Huffington Post and Forbes, and also enjoys tending his backyard vegetable patch.
Workplace structure.
What popped into your mind after reading those words? A large office building with hundreds of employees and multiple layers of management? Something gargantuan and sluggish?
That is certainly how I pictured the classic workplace structure, especially before starting my own company. Now I truly understand that all businesses, no matter how small, have a set structure of who reports to who – and for good reason. While it may sound unnecessarily methodical and plodding, it adds an element of organization to your organization.
Something I learned through years of trial and error was that organizational structures are a fluid beast – they need to evolve and grow as your company does.
Below are some of my tips for ensuring the success and longevity of your business, with lessons from Lego, Zappos, and my own company.
As you’ll have noticed when you phone call centers, visit the bank, or deal with the government in any capacity, bureaucracy can make organizations slow and frustrating to deal with.
Endless forms and complex layers of approval impact a company’s services along with the morale of its employees. It can leave organizations unable to adapt to new market pressures or external threats.
The UK Home Office, during the Windrush Scandal, ended up wrongly deporting many people who came to Britain after the Second World War from the Caribbean. It was exposed that these people were being wrongly deported yet deportations and other negative effects continued, as illustrated by The Guardian. The organization failed to respond adequately, and a scandal was born.
Despite all this, large organizations in our society – whether they’re governments or big business – aren’t just going to go away. Instead they need to find ways to adapt and improve while retaining the benefits which pushed them to develop complex bureaucratic structures in the first place.
The big question is: how do you manage operations within a bureaucratic organization so that it can run with the agility of a startup?
In this Process Street article, we’ll explore:
Pinch analysis is a difficult topic to talk about, as it both has widely applicable techniques which can reduce the need for external resources, but it’s traditionally very complicated and used in a limited business sector.
That’s why today I’ll be breaking down the topic and showing how the principles behind it can be used across any and all disciplines.
You don’t have to be a thermodynamics buff to understand this; it all comes down to analyzing what you have, what by-products your processes create, and whether you can use those by-products to your advantage.
By doing this, traditional pinch analysis is able to typically result in energy savings of 10-35% – that’s a third less energy you need to generate or import to carry out your processes.
Lets’ get stuck in.
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No matter how foolproof you think your operations are, human error will always pose a threat. Heck, it’s already responsible for 52% of security and data breaches, was the root cause of a host of famous tragedies, and can strike at any time.
But what exactly is human error, and how can we limit its effects if it can’t be completely prevented?
To answer that question, we here at Process Street have broken it down for you. In this article, you’ll learn:
It’s time to stop leaving your success open to random chances of failure.
