After Elon Musk’s successes sending Falcon Heavy into space with his Roadster attached, the fanfare around his achievements has reached new highs.

But not everything is rosy for Musk.

Tesla is struggling. It’s not hitting its production targets for the Model 3, and this is not for the first time.

The goal for Tesla has been to hit 5,000 units per week and though Musk is confident of reaching that figure the Model 3 production has been mired by continually failing to meet demand.

It’s not enough just to have a good product, you also need to have high performing production systems in place to take that product effectively to market.

In this Process Street article, we’ll tackle the machine which builds the machine and we’re going to look at:

• What a production system is and what a good one looks like
• The production system of the future and how Elon Musk wants to build it
• Why a production system isn’t just for manufacturing
• How you can build production systems for your business
• Why Tesla’s Gigafactory is Musk’s most ambitious project yet

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Documenting processes is great in theory, but creating and following them can be a pain.

Your processes need to be standardized so that everyone’s performing the same tasks consistently. However, that often leaves you with either a large, complex and unusable process which covers every situation or lots of smaller, specialized processes which become difficult to manage or track.

Conditional logic saves you all of that trouble by letting you create processes which change to suit the situation at hand.

By setting rules for your processes to follow and update based on their outcome, you can simplify your processes and make even the most complicated task list easy to navigate. All optional tasks can be automatically hidden from view until (and if) they are required to keep your dashboard clear and encourage teams to avoid taking shortcuts.

Nobody wants to work through a horribly complex process that you know you won’t need half of to complete your task.

However, as with business process automation, conditional logic’s power is best shown through examples, so today I’ll be showing you both how to use it and giving eight example processes which take advantage of it, including client onboarding and user support.

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When it comes to hiring staff you’ll go through multiple important stages to vet the candidates and make sure you choose the right one.

For many managers, the interview is the most important step.

The interview allows you to ask questions and interact with the other person; verify their claims, test their knowledge, and start to figure out whether you would be happy working with them in future. This allows you to go beyond simply the information on a CV.

As Ray Dalio, founder and CEO of Bridgewater Associates, phrased it:

Weigh values and abilities more heavily than skills in deciding whom to hire.

Knowing about the human sat in front of you is crucial to a successful hire.

In this article, we’re going to give you a selection of Process Street templates which should help the whole process run smoothly:

• Key tips on how to conduct an interview
• 5 interview processes with questions
• How to connect a job application form to Zapier to automate your hiring
• 5 hiring processes to cover everything else

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Some people seem like naturals when it comes to sales. Their smooth talking and deep product knowledge entices customers and makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Source

A high performing sales person is a huge asset to a company, and they’re often paid very well as a reward!

• Maybe you want to start a new business and need to jump into the sales role to get your fledgling startup off the ground?
• Maybe you want to build a sales team to crush sales goals while you focus on your specialty?
• Or maybe you just want to get into sales as a career and need to know how to get up to speed fast?

Well, in this Process Street article we’ll cover solutions to each of these conundrums. We’ll look at:

1. How Salesforce hit their sales goals
2. 10 top tips the sales experts have for a beginner
3. How Close.io CEO Steli Efti builds outbound sales teams
4. What steps you need to take to build sales processes (with a load of premade templates to help you get started!)

“A goal properly set is halfway reached.” – Legendary sales guru, Zig Ziglar.

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What do you do if you don’t have the time or know-how to document and improve your processes?

You hire a business process consultant of course!

While we’ve talked endlessly in the past about why processes are important and how to manage your own, hiring a business process consultant lets you reap all the benefits without having to spend an age assessing your organization and talking to every last employee involved.

So, if you want to organize your processes and bring efficiency to your business but don’t have time to do it yourself, read on!

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To understand the value of a style guide, you should first try working without one.

You’d get the wrong blue on your logo, jarring copy, and code that can only be maintained by a lone developer.

Writers, editors, programmers, engineers, social media managers, and support agents all need an indication of how their company wants to work, so they can ensure consistency.

The number one goal of a style guide is consistency.

Inconsistency weakens your brand image, makes your company look unprofessional, and hurts conversion rate and revenue. Once you’ve settled on your brand voice and style, the style guide is the document that enforces those values.

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Processes can be used to optimize the things you do every day, and we spend most of our time telling you that!

But where do these processes come from? Really.

Maybe you just documented your steps one day and built from there? In which case, the process evolved naturally from the actions you took intuitively. When I add big words into that description I can make it sound like a good thing. But it could be put another way.

You never took the time to think about the foundations of your process.

At the very base of all processes are a series of said and unsaid principles. In good processes and bad processes. If we want the best processes we can make, we need to understand and critically evaluate the principles which knowingly or unknowingly guide our every decision.

Ray Dalio’s text, Principles, answers the question “how does a hedge fund work?” and gives us an insight into how he built the world’s largest one, Bridgewater Associates.

Bridgewater manages $160 billion worth of assets for 350 different clients. These clients range from large corporate bodies like McDonald’s to pension and wealth funds, and even to the assets of central banks. The whole company has been built around cultivating a radical company culture, and it is this radical company culture which makes Bridgewater Associates so successful and worth investigating!

In this Process Street article, we’re going to present to you a number of the ideas contained within the book and we’re going to pull out three specific company processes Dalio has developed on the back of these principles:

• Ray Dalio’s Meeting Process
• Ray Dalio’s Hiring Process
• Ray Dalio’s Process Improvement Method

But be warned: it’s likely a radical break from your office!

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We’ve all heard about the importance of focusing on one task at a time.

Take that idea, apply it to manufacturing, and you have the concept of one piece flow.

The concept is simple in that you have to limit yourself to working on one item at a time (you only ever have one WIP item). By doing this you can save time and money, as work is performed faster and any space you use is highly optimized.

In fact, it’s the very same concept that Toyota used to reduce the time taken to pack boxes in to help families hit by Hurricane Sandy by 94%.  In total, the aid workers were able to feed 400 more families in less than half the time.

However, there are a few vital things that you need to be careful of when applying one piece (or “continuous”) flow. It’s not a miracle cure, and while it can be used outside of an assembly line, there are a few practical elements which can’t be ignored.

So, today I’ll be diving into:

• What one piece flow is
• The advantages and disadvantages
• How to implement it
• Using one piece flow in any area of your business
• The problems of theory vs practical effects

Let’s get started.

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The following is a guest post from Pascal van Opzeeland. Pascal is CMO of Userlike, software for website and messaging support. He and his team share tips about customer service and communication on the Userlike Blog.

In school, everyone looks forward to the day they can stop learning and start doing. But once inside hamster wheel of working life, many long back to the times in which they had the time to invest in their personal development.

At Userlike, we see this lack of time for personal learning as a serious challenge. The world is developing faster than ever, and the pace is only accelerating. To stay competitive, we need employees to keep up; to keep learning and stay up-to-date with their craft. Other benefits from  having a culture that stimulates continuous learning include:

• Increased productivity
• Attract and retain talent
• The ability to grow leaders in-house and reward loyalty

The best employees have an innate desire to grow, but it’s hard to free up time when your daily tasks and duties mess up your schedule. Learning is one of those high importance – low urgency tasks that easily gets pushed aside.

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We talk a lot about business processes here on Process Street, but today we’re going to do things a little differently. Instead of waxing lyrical about business efficiency, I’m going to show how surgical checklists have evolved over history, and how they continue to save lives today.

From prehistoric humans poking each other with sticks and rocks, to the Ancient Greeks, the discovery of germs and antiseptics, up to modern day medical marvels, surgical procedures make a great case for why documented checklists are vital for continued success.

Not only that, but by looking at how major theoretical and technological breakthroughs have affected surgical checklists, we can better show why documenting and maintaining your processes isn’t as hard as you might think.

Alternatively, if you’re just interested in medical history, stick around for the ride – I’ll be making this interesting for all.

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