Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) helps a team identify how a process, product, or service could fail, understand the effects, and prioritize preventive action before customers feel the impact.

The 2017 British Airways catastrophe shows why that discipline matters. An early estimate put the potential cost as high as £100 million, while IAG later reported an estimated gross cost of about £80 million. The IT outage disrupted tens of thousands of travelers and exposed how a single failure can travel through an interconnected operation.

Genchi Genbutsu is a Toyota problem-solving principle that means “actual place, actual thing.” It asks leaders to go to the source, inspect the real work or object, speak with the people closest to it, and verify facts before choosing a countermeasure.

Reports, dashboards, interviews, and AI summaries can reveal patterns, but each is an abstraction. Genchi Genbutsu combines those signals with firsthand evidence so a team can distinguish the condition it assumes exists from the one people actually experience.

DMAIC is a five-step, data-driven improvement cycle: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control. Used in Six Sigma, it helps teams find and remove defects in an existing process.

This guide walks through each step, the measurements and tools used at each stage, and the controls that keep an improvement from slipping back.

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a methodology for designing or fundamentally redesigning products, services, and processes so customer requirements and defect prevention are built in before launch. Applied well, Design for Six Sigma can supercharge your business by preventing costly design failures before they reach full operation.

DFSS is the umbrella approach. DMADV, Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify, is one of its most common phase models. Use it when you are creating something new or overhauling a design. Use DMAIC when you need to improve an existing process with measurable performance data.

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Lean management, Six Sigma, and Lean Six Sigma all walk into a bar. Lean orders a Scotch. Six Sigma orders bourbon. Lean Six Sigma orders a hot toddy. The bartender says, “So that will be a whisky, a whiskey, and a bit of both.”

The joke works because the methods are related, but they are not identical. Lean removes waste, Six Sigma reduces defects and variation, and Lean Six Sigma combines both goals. This guide maps nine practical Six Sigma tools and techniques to the Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control stages of the DMAIC framework.

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Business risk is any event, condition, or decision that can stop a company from meeting its objectives. The risk may start inside the business, with people, systems, customers, competitors, or controls, or outside it, with disrupted supply chains, extreme weather, climate transition, and ecosystem loss.

Managing business risk means identifying exposure early, assessing likelihood and impact, assigning an owner, choosing a response, and collecting evidence that the control worked. This guide covers six direct business risks and the 3 main threats that can cascade through climate and nature. It also explains how you can manage each risk through controlled execution.

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AS9100 is the internationally recognized quality management system standard for aviation, space, and defense organizations. The current published edition is AS9100 Rev D, aligned with IAQG 9100:2016 and built on ISO 9001:2015. It keeps ISO 9001’s quality management foundation and adds aerospace controls for product safety, operational risk, configuration management, supplier oversight, counterfeit-part prevention, and traceability.

Those controls are one part of a much larger safety system that also includes engineering, regulation, maintenance, training, and accident investigation. The results are striking: IATA recorded 51 accidents across 38.7 million flights in 2025, while an MIT analysis estimated one fatality per 13.7 million passenger boardings from 2018 through 2022. AS9100 matters because it makes disciplined quality work repeatable across a complex global supply chain.

Business process optimization is the disciplined practice of measuring how work moves today, finding the constraint that matters most, testing a better method, and controlling the result so the improvement lasts.

This guide shows you how to diagnose a process, work through a real optimization example, apply a DMAIC-based method, and use free templates. It also explains how Process Street connects controlled documentation, repeatable workflows, approvals, evidence, and built-in AI in one Compliance Operations Platform.

$22 trillion was the cost of the 2008 financial crisis to the U.S. economy. Roughly 200,000 small businesses vanished into the recession, taking around 3 million jobs with them. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission later concluded that much of that devastation traced back to audit process failures.

Follow a sound audit process and you catch problems early. Skip it and the fallout scales from a single business right up to the national economy. This guide breaks down what an audit process is, why it matters, the five steps professional auditors follow, and how to run the whole thing inside Process Street.

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What is better than fixing something when it breaks? Stopping it from breaking in the first place. Are you poka-yoke woke? Stop mistakes with this error prevention method by adding a simple safeguard to a process so a mistake becomes impossible, obvious, or unable to move forward. A poka-yoke woke stop is a deliberate point where the process catches the error.

Born from the Toyota Production System, poka yoke turns quality from a final inspection into part of the work itself. The approach applies far beyond manufacturing. Any team can use mistake-proofing to design safer workflows, catch omissions, and prevent defects before they reach a customer.