Would you eat a McDonalds Big Mac that was out-of-date, had been dropped on the floor, and made with a stranger’s bare hands?

No! Me neither.

Unfortunately, that’s what thousands of people in China, unknowingly, did.

Back in 2015, the Chinese meat suppliers for McDonald’s were secretly filmed and caught:

“Handling meat and chicken with their bare hands, taking meat that had fallen on the floor and adding it back on to the production line…and forging production dates on beef patties.” – ET2C, Lessons on the Importance of Quality Control Checks

Around 4,300 McDonalds beef patties were tested and found to be out-of-date and contaminated with bacteria.

As a result, over 2,000 McDonald’s outlets across Asia were dramatically affected. The reputation of McDonald’s and their meat supplier was irreversibly damaged, and McDonald’s saw a 7.3% drop in sales.

McDonald’s was definitely not ‘lovin it’.

If only they’d used Enterprise Quality Management Software (EQMS) to regulate their supplier’s meat handling processes and control the quality of the produce they were delivering.

Companies who use EQMS to manage quality, experience fewer product quality issues (less than 1%), and improve their productivity by 20%.

Keen to find out more? Join me in this Process Street post as we run through the following:

• What is EQMS and how does it work?
• Who uses EQMS?
• Is EQMS it just for regulated organizations?
• What are the bottlenecks of EQMS?
• The best EQMS alternative (+free templates)?
• Top 8 EQMS software

Let’s make our way through the golden arches and get started!
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Implementing a quality management system (QMS software) is an important investment companies cannot overlook.

One Harvard Business Review study found that companies with an ISO 9001 certification have much higher rates of “corporate survival, sales, employment growth, and wage increases than a matched group of non-adopters.”

For instance, 65% of companies save $25,000 or more in costs within their first year of implementing a QMS.

Adopting a QMS software can also boost efficiency and consistency of work, increase customer satisfaction, raise product value, and reduce unnecessary costs and overall risks.

A good quality management system is all about achieving a quality-driven culture within your company, and as a result, making your product better and marketing it faster. But in order to access these benefits, it’s important that you choose the right QMS solution for you and your company.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be going over the foundation of everything you need to know before choosing your quality management system software.

We’ll be covering:

• What is a quality management system (QMS)?
• Agile QMS
• Best QMS software
• Build your agile QMS with Process Street

Understanding quality and seeking to improve it is arguably the core purpose behind undertaking process improvements. Hence the creation of the Deming cycle.

But where did this philosophy of process improvement come from?

One key person is William Edwards Deming – sometimes referred to as Edward W. Deming. He’s principally a statistician, but one could even call him a philosopher of science.

Deming’s goal was to reapply the scientific method to business processes, and has left us with two main variants of his thinking: PDSA and PDCA.

In this article we’ll outline:

• What the Deming cycle is, with its history
• How to apply the Deming cycle to improve your business processes
• The important distinction between PDSA and PDCA
• How PDSA is employed in the medical field

Deming’s approach is not just about improving processes, but about improving a whole business.

In a recent meta-study from the British Medical Journal, researchers found only 2 out of 73 studies had applied PDSA in a way which fully met criteria. Commenting:

To progress the development of the science of improvement, a greater understanding of the use of improvement methods, including PDSA, is essential to draw reliable conclusions about their effectiveness.

And that’s why we’re writing this article!

If the United Nations Environment Programme is to be taken seriously, the current generation is the last generation with a realistic chance of kick-starting the processes necessary to halt or reverse the looming global crisis of climate change.

“We are clearly the last generation that can change the course of climate change, but we are also the first generation with its consequences,” Kristalina Georgieva, the CEO of the World Bank.

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ISO 9001 certification is an international standard for defining a quality management system (QMS). It outlines various criteria (or standards) to define quality management principles such as focusing on the customer, optimizing leadership and management within the organization, improving and fine-tuning internal processes, and general methods of continuous improvement.

If you’re working toward ISO 9001 certification or maintaining it, Process Street’s ISO 9001 software can help you document, manage, and improve your quality processes with ease.

Let’s break down each of the components of and ISO 9001 certification.

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Growing up on an island, my favorite food was in abundance: Fish.

However, whenever I ate at a restaurant there was always a voice in the back of my head wondering if the fish had been mismanaged and, due to that mismanagement, I’d get sick.

My anxiety around food safety wasn’t exactly unfounded. Fish is the most commonly impacted food group when it comes to disease outbreaks, and a quarter of a million people in the U.S. get sick each year from contaminated fish. And when it comes to all food groups, the CDC estimates that a whopping 1 in 6 Americans (which equates to 48 million people) become ill each year due to foodborne illness.

However, by not coming at food safety with a HACCP approach – and by creating and following a solid HACCP plan – these figures could be far, far higher.

Ergo: HACCP is important and, as a business in the food industry, you can even be required by law to go about HACCP properly.

To help you out, in this post I’ll discuss what HACCP and a HACCP plan are in detail, HACCP’s history, the benefits, and how Process Street can help you with all-things HACCP and food safety.

Just read through the following sections:

• What is HACCP (and what is a HACCP plan)?
• The incredible history of HACCP
• The benefits of HACCP (and having a HACCP plan)
• Use Process Street for all-things HACCP!

Let’s swim through the rest of the post!

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Joseph Juran, the Architect of Quality, paved the way for the active pursuit of quality in Business with the Juran Trilogy.

The Juran Trilogy redefined quality management; reducing chronic defects and the costs associated below a 20% industry expectation.

The Juran Trilogy has been shown to give benefits across multiple parameters, increasing productivity, reducing cycle-times, improving human safety, and reducing product failure rates – with a 80% reduction in some cases.

For us as Process Street, the Juran Trilogy is one of our favorite tools for improving business operations. It’s a straightforward methodology that brings results.

Learn how to apply the Juran Trilogy for your business, and improve the quality of operations. Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say:

• What is the Juran Trilogy?
• Using the Juran Trilogy for quality control: Quality planning, control and improvement
• Implementing the Juran Trilogy using Process Street
• Juran Trilogy examples: Quality improvement in the real world

Let’s get started!

Quality management. Oh, how I love thee.

You’ve given us rubber flavored cookies, phones that go up in smoke, and exploding car airbags (we’ll get to all of that later).

Last year, 337 food products passed through stringent quality management procedures and went to market with major issues. So major, in fact, that each and every one of those products had to be recalled. This cost the US economy over $7 million.

But, the cost of poor quality management surrounding the production of food is only a tiny part of the picture:

“Defective product incidents have caused in excess of $2 billion of losses over five years” – Allianz, Product Recall, Managing the Impact of the New Risk Landscape

When you consider that the global quality management software market is valued at $7.96 billion, why are we, as consumers, still being exposed to low quality, defective products?

Because, contrary to what most organizations think, there is more to quality management than simply making a good product. You need to know how you’re going to make it good and how you’re going to make sure it remains good.

In other words, you need a plan. A quality management plan to be exact.

The reasons for this will become even clearer as we make our way through this Process Street post and discuss:

• What is a quality management plan?
• What is the most useful thing about a quality management plan?
• What’s included in a quality management plan?
• How to enforce a quality management plan

Let’s get planning.
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Call center quality assurance is like going to the dentist: everyone agrees it should be done regularly, no one likes doing it, and it’s probably been put off much longer than it should.

No one’s blaming you – agents hate it, supervisors hate it, even quality assurance auditors hate it. It’s tedious, time-consuming, and repetitive. Add to that the high call center attrition rate and low job satisfaction, and you may be wondering: why even bother?

Well, I’ll tell you. In this post, I’ll cover:

• What is call center quality assurance?
• Why is call center quality assurance important?
• How to overcome your QA obstacles
• 11 free call center quality assurance templates
• Automate your workflow with Process Street + Zapier

Plus I’ll provide you with 11 free checklists to take the drudgery out of QA audits!

If you came for the templates, grab them here:

• Call Center Agent Training Program Checklist Template
• Call Center Quality Assurance (QA) Agent Training Process Checklist Template
• Call Center Quality Assurance Structure Template
• Call Center Quality Assurance Audit Template
• Call Center Customer Service Quality Assurance Form
• Call Center Sales Quality Assurance Form
• Call Center Outbound Sales Quality Assurance Form
• Call Center Helpdesk Quality Assurance Form
• Call Center Metrics Calculation Checklist Template
• Manager Weekly Report Checklist Template
• Daily Supervisor Checklist

If you want to use these checklists, just sign in with your Process Street account and start customizing your templates. If you don’t have an account yet, sign-up here to get started with your free trial!

Otherwise, let’s get to it.
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I don’t want to alarm you, but without process control, you’d be dead.

What? How? Why? …What?!

Your body is continuously performing a series of processes to keep you alive, and it’s constantly checking for irregularities in these processes. If it picks up an abnormality, it immediately takes measures to regulate it and return it to its desired state. Like when you’re too hot, for example. Your body recognizes that your temperature is above normal and produces water, in the form of sweat, to cool you down.

So you see, process control is the reason you’re alive and able to enjoy this Process Street post!

But this isn’t a lesson in biology (thankfully); the same concept can be applied to organizations too.

With adequate process control, businesses can perform efficiently, effectively, and safely. They can function at a consistent level and can even reduce operating costs by up to 6%. Without it, they would miss opportunities, make costly mistakes, and struggle to survive.

“Process control is the ability to monitor and adjust a process to give a desired output.” – Beck Electric Actuators, What is Process Control?

To discover how process control can cut costs and eliminate errors within your organization, we need to find answers to the following questions:

• What is process control?
• Who uses process control & what do they use it for?
• Why should organizations use process control?
• How can you implement process control with Process Street?

To satisfy your curiosity (and return your body back to its normal state!), you’d better keep reading…
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