One of the key parts of driving your business forward is being able to identify and tackle muda.

Is a process taking too long? Is it creating a bottleneck? Are your workers struggling to be productive?

In this Process Street article, we look again at what managers can learn from the Toyota Production System about how to improve your business processes.

The specific concept we’re tackling is muda. Muda translates roughly as waste, and refers to the inefficiencies within processes which you can seek to reduce or eliminate entirely.

As Rene T. Domingo outlines in his paper Identifying and Eliminating The Seven Wastes or Muda for the Asian Institute of Management:

The elimination of waste is the primary goal of any lean system. In effect, lean declares war on waste – any waste. Waste or muda is anything that does not have value or does not add value. Waste is something the customer will not pay for.

We’ll look at the core 7 types of waste Toyota see within processes and production systems and consider the claims for the addition of an eighth.

Processes are a lot more interesting than you’d first think. That isn’t some kind of joke — they’re interesting, I swear. But what is a process?

Although they’re defined as “a collection of interrelated work tasks initiated in response to an event that achieves a specific result”, there’s a bit of a backstory that helps us cut through the corporate tranquilizers and understand what a process is, and why processes matter.

First, a few examples of processes:

• Cleaning the store
• Finding an email address
• Deploying software
• Customer profiling
• Onboarding a new employee
• Planning a wedding

But why are those processes? Why aren’t they just jobs to be done? The point is that when you formalize a process, you think about the workflow with productivity in mind and it makes it easier to execute and optimize.

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69% of Millennials would rather make $50k a year at a job they love than $75k a year in a boring job.

On top of that, the cost to the US economy of a disengaged, dissatisfied employee can be up to $500 billion a year.

So how do you make sure that you provide a role that both addresses the needs of your employee and aligns with company goals?

The answer? Adopting these HR best practices.

At Process Street, we recognize the delicate balance between your business and your employees that’s maintained primarily by your HR department. The best practices in this post will ensure that balance stays in place.

You don’t have to take just our word for it, though. We’ll also look at how Adobe, Google, Accenture, and Salesforce implement them in their own companies.

In this article, we will discuss the following:

• The benefits of HR best practices
• Implementing your HR best practices
• HR best practice maintenance for the long-term

Ready to get started?
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Creating workflows with Process Street is as quick and easy as 1-2-3. To prove it here are five tips to help you create your first workflow:

• Pages: The peanut butter to your workflows
• Pick a simple, repeatable workflow
• Complete your task list first
• Use form fields to capture information
• Assign your team members
• Connect your favorite apps in one place

Let’s get started!
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No process is perfect; there’s always room to improve. Unfortunately, many teams have no way to identify, test, and deploy the changes they make, meaning each tweak is a roll of the dice.

The savings can be massive, but you need a continuous improvement program to make sure that the changes you make won’t make your operations a whole lot harder.

“1 in 10 improvements save money… [each saving, on average,] $31,043 in its first year of implementation.
1 in 4 improvements save time… [each saving, on average,] 270 hours in its first year of implementation.”
– KaiNexus, The ROI of Continuous Improvement

Most successful changes will also make your employees’ jobs easier (and more enjoyable) to perform. You’ll be saving time and money, but you’ll also be getting far better value out of your current efforts and operations.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the top.

• What is continuous improvement?
• Incremental vs. breakthrough improvements
• The benefits of continuous improvement
• How to deploy continuous improvement
• Improvement resources to dive deeper

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This article is based on a segment from Process Street‘s Highway 2021 virtual event, where Anne Perry, Process Street’s resident process design expert, shares with us how we’ve built processes for hundreds of teams to help make work fun, fast, and faultless.

Process Design Masterclass: What I’ve Learned Building Processes for Hundreds of Teams was the eighth segment in Process Street’s Highway event.

You can check out our playlist of the full Highway event here, and don’t forget to sign up for free with Process Street!

Here’s the Process Design Masterclass with Anne Perry segment in full:

• Anne Perry: Process Street’s resident process design expert
• Four Ws and an H
• Why: Why does this workflow exist?
• What: What needs to be done?
• How: How do I do it?
• Who: Who does what?
• When: When are things supposed to be done?

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At Process Street, we serve over 450,000 registered users including the likes of Salesforce, Spotify, and Airbnb. We work with our users to help them get the best out of our software. With this goal in mind, we bring you this article detailing the top 5 secret hacks and tricks in Process Street.

We found out how the Process Street team uses our nifty workflow documentation software in their day-to-day activities. We gathered the responses given from every department and narrowed them down to present 5 top hacks and tricks you can incorporate into your Process Street experience today.

• Trick #1: Document your daily schedule as a checklist
• Trick #2: Automate date form fields to pre-fill
• Trick #3: Use saved views to summarize workflow data
• Trick #4: Order Conditional Logic instructions and use hidden admin tasks
• Trick #5: Embed webpages inside Process Street’s workflows

With that said, let’s jump straight to it!
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Premier Claims is a public adjusting firm that secures an average increase on claim payments 700% greater than before their involvement in the negotiation. They represent policyholders and contractors when negotiating fair claim settlements from insurance carriers on property damage. This includes damage from hail, wind, fire, and smoke.

Premier Claims discovered Process Street in July 2020, and have since moved many of their processes to our platform. Process Street has given Premier Claims an easy and elegant means of collecting and securely storing client information.

One such process Premier Claims uses Process Street for is their Claims and Client Intake Workflow. When the Process Street version of this workflow was first beta-tested, the salesperson’s response spoke volumes to the reliefs Process Street brings the Premier Claims team.

“[Process Street is]…literally the easiest thing in the world.” – Premier Claims salesperson, Claims and Client intake workflow Demo

Premier Claims wanted to share their positive experience from using Process Street and decided to create a video demo of their Claims and Client Workflow.
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According to Deloitte Insights, advances in technology are changing the business landscape and they are calling this a digital disruption. This is altering customer expectations and demands, presenting critical challenges for customer success teams globally.

To successfully ride this wave of change, Deloitte – and us here at Process Street – believe businesses should rethink how they are measuring value delivered to the customer. The aim is to ensure these measurements are customer-centric to refine CS activities and enhance the customer’s experience.

Think of it as a customer success evolution in response to digital disruption.

This CS transformation has the potential to bolster positive referrals by 83%, lower costs by 20%, and increase customer lifetime value by x1.6.

What have you got to lose?

In this article, you’ll learn how to apply a customer-centric means of measuring customer value generated for your organization. I’ve split the process down into three steps based on the Customer-Centric Digital Transformation report by Deloitte.

• From churn reduction to customer value generation (applying customer success 2.0)
• Measuring value in 3 steps: Determining customer and internal success
• Determining value generated – Step #1: Measure the outside-in value perception
• Determining value generated – Step #2: Measuring inside-out value perception
• Determining value generated – Step #3: Measuring internal success using business outcomes

With that said, let’s jump straight to it!
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A recent Deloitte study found a mere 30% of respondents stated customer success was a strategic priority by the board of directors. Only 26% reported official business communications to regularly mention customer success.

At Process Street, we find this concerning. Technological advancements and the rise of Industry 4.0 are altering the business landscape. Businesses are facing new pressures, with changing customer demands and expectations as the biggest catalyst altering how business is done. To respond, organizations need to focus on customer success (CS).

Businesses need to lead a successful customer success transformation, one that means they’re more customer-centric. In this Process Street article, I explain how organizations should do this in three simple steps.

• Why we need to think differently about customer success
• The companies leading in customer success are making a customer-centric transition
• 3 steps to manage your customer-centric transition

With that said, let’s jump straight to it!
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