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.
What is Genchi Genbutsu? It’s part of the Toyota Production System conceptual toolkit. And it works.
It’s one thing to identify errors or weaknesses in your business, but it’s another to actually fix and improve them.
The crucial step in fixing an error is deciding the right solution to implement. Pick the wrong one and you create a different problem.
When you’re in a massive company, you want to make sure you’re picking the right solution before you start implementing across a whole corporate structure.
Because of this, investigating the problem as thoroughly as possible should be paramount. And this leads us to Genchi Genbutsu.
In this Process Street article, we’re going to look at:
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.
British Airways chief executive described the incident as “catastrophic” as 800 flights were canceled and 75,000 travelers were affected.
Flight compensation website flightright.com estimated that British Airways would have to pay around €61m to passengers for refunds alone under EU legislation. Add to this the cost of reimbursing angry passengers for unexpected hotel stays and other inconveniences, and the total financial damage to British Airways has been estimated at £100m.
Why? Someone turned their data center off and on again.
The entire airline was down for almost 2 days. This wasn’t a natural disaster, it was a process failure.
In this article, we’ll explore how to spot process failures before they occur using a system called Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). We’ll assess an overview and then delve in deeper to ground our understanding and include a premade Process Street FMEA template to help you run your own assessments in future.
In this article we’ll cover:
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:
Let’s swim through the rest of the post!
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
To satisfy your curiosity (and return your body back to its normal state!), you’d better keep reading…
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I have a proposal for you.
I can build you a house, complete with walls, windows, doors, and a roof for $350,000.
Do we have a deal?
No. I didn’t think so!
To make a decision like this, you need cold hard facts. You need details, clarity, and proof! You need budgets, breakdowns, and solid guarantees.
That’s exactly how a project stakeholder feels when they receive your project proposal, and to further complicate things, calculating an average proposal win rate is next to impossible.
Project stakeholders will, on average, receive around 50 proposals a week. To choose you out of this huge pile, they need clarity, details, specifics, lateral thinking, and a whole heap of persuasion.
You need to learn the art of how to write a project proposal, to stand any chance of winning their investment, and increasing your proposal success rate.
So, join me in this Process Street post where we will take the following lessons in how to write a project proposal:
If you’re in a hurry, grab this Project Proposal Template Checklist, and catch up with the class later:
Click here to access the Project Proposal Template Checklist!
Now, butts on seats, no talking, and let the class begin!
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