70% of all businesses fail within the first 10 years.

Business owners reading this: for every ten of you, 7 will fold.

Despite that morbid start, I begin this Process Street article looking at the operational audit. I will demonstrate how using an operational audit can refine, improve, and evolve your business operations, setting you up for business prosperity. Wouldn’t it be nice to alter the above stat to 100% business success?

A tall order but, as the Westlife song goes, Nothing is impossible – apologies if you are not a Westlife fan. I believe that optimized operational audits play a significant role in driving business success. In this article, I will explain why. You will also find out:

1. What an operational audit is
2. The benefits operational audits bring to Business
3. Operational audit best practices
4. How you can implement internal operational audits with Process Street. These will be recurring processes within your business

To jump to the relevant section, click on the links below. Alternatively, scroll down and read all to become an expert in the auditing world.

• Operational audit: What is an operational audit?
• Operational audit: What do operational auditors do?
• Operational audit: Best practices used by the experts
• Integrating operational audit best practices into your internal operational audit process
• Operational audit: Why you should use an audit checklist to conduct your internal operational audit
• Use Process Street and our audit checklists to conduct your internal operational audit

Let’s get started!

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Job loss.

Insolvency.

Falling asset prices.

Complete market standstill.

Ring any bells?

You remember, as clearly as I do, the economic disaster of 2008. A global financial crisis; what could have caused such an economic catastrophe?

One hypothesis: Financial audit failures.

As concluded by the Financial Crises Inquiry Commission (FCIC), financial audit failures were found to have played a significant part in the financial crash.

Just like the FCIC, we at Process Street understand the importance of standards enforced by financial audit processes.

This article has been structured into two sections. The first section looks at the financial audit. The second section considers the International Standards on Auditing (ISA).

The ISA standards are a specific set of rules that operate globally.

Here’s a more thorough breakdown:

• The financial audit: What are financial audits?
• The financial audit: What are the International Standards on Auditing (ISA)?
• The financial audit: The benefits of International Standards on Auditing (ISA)
• How you can use Process Street to help with your external auditing processes
• ISA audit checklist

In the last section of this article, you will get your hands on our nifty ISA audit checklist for free.

You can use this template to conduct an internal check on your finances audits against the International Standards on Auditing. This checklist will save your organization a heap of time, worry, and money.
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Approvals are everywhere. If you’ve worked on any project involving any kind of deliverables, chances are you’re all-too-familiar with the approval process (or rejection process, depending).

Documents, prototypes, reports, mock-ups, wireframes, storyboards, and even more internally-facing elements like simple holiday leave requests. All of these represent different kinds of approval process, and approvals are an integral workflow element.

Approvals can also represent a major bottleneck.

Consider how you are currently approving work in your business. Perhaps you have a vague process involving emails, and if you’re particularly attentive you might be tracking it in a spreadsheet.

These methods are slow and prone to delays. You have no way of tracking anything reliably, you are more likely to miss approval windows, and information has to be sent manually between individuals.

What’s more, it’s quite difficult to improve this process without the proper system in place. You need to make sure you’ve got the right tools to optimize your approval process.

Process Street‘s approvals feature is the solution to this problem.

We created the approvals feature to make the process of approving work as fast and easy as possible.

With approvals, you can:

• Get notified as soon as work is ready for approval
• Approve (or reject) work with zero friction using a clear, streamlined interface
• Approve on-the-go, from your phone’s email inbox
• Synergize with many other Process Street features to optimize process efficiency
• Save time and stay on top of your workflow

In this post, I have a trove of templates to showcase the approvals feature. All of the templates in this article are custom-built to make your life easier.

They also take advantage of Process Street‘s other powerful features like rich form fields, conditional logic, dynamic due dates, and role assignments.

So, read on for:

• A quick introduction to approvals
• Different types of approval process
• How to add approval tasks in Process Street
• Approval process best practices
• 20+ free approval process templates (each use-case explained)
• How to approve tasks straight from your phone
• Optimize your approvals with more process street features
• More great workflow automation resources

Read on to learn how to hit the ground running with the approvals feature.

Only 23% of surveyed CEOs believe that they have comprehensive information about the risks of their business.

Can you confidently state that you belong in that 23%?

Even if you are not a CEO, as an employee, are you sure you know all the risks within your workplace?

If not, then keep reading.

In this article, you will learn about risk and how to manage it, specifically via risk mitigation. You are also provided with a thorough list of Process Street resources and templates. These are designed for you to gain a good understanding of business risk, risk management and risk mitigation.

This article is structured as below:

• A definition of risk
• What is risk management
• What is risk mitigation
• Risk mitigation application
• Risk mitigation and risk management: A broader picture

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Anastasia Stefanuk is a passionate writer and a marketing manager at Mobilunity. The company provides professional staffing services, so she is always aware of technology news and wants to share her experience to help tech startups and companies to be up-to-date. 

As a business person or a person who owns a computer, how prepared are you in protecting yourself against data loss?

If you lost all of your important files and memorable photos, do you think you would be able to run data recovery to reclaim them?

Data recovery is the process of salvaging lost data from either a secondary storage system, removable media or files.

In this digital era, data has been classified as the new “oil”. In the business world, data is the driving force behind innovation, competition, productivity, and improvement of core operations. Likewise, governments all over the world require data to make vital decisions that will affect their populace.

With that in mind, the convergence of data streaming from billions of mobile phones, digital platforms, virtual-reality applications, and wireless sensors, continue to pile up with each passing day. In fact, it is estimated that the amount of electronic data in existence today is 2.7 zettabytes. This number is expected to grow to 175 zettabytes by 2025.

This presents a humongous challenge in managing and ensuring that such a large amount of data is secure. In addition, the looming question in many people’s minds is; what would happen if all this data magically disappeared? Would the world come to a standstill or are there backup mechanisms where it can be retrieved later?

In this article, Process Street will expound on the main causes of data loss, the importance of backing it up, and tips on how you can successfully run data recovery processes.

This article has been broken down into the following sections.

• Causes of data loss and the impact on your business
• How to avert the cost of data loss
• Best practices to prevent data loss
• Use a professional service to prevent data loss and implement data recovery

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In 2018, Apple rolled out their brand new iPad Pro; top-of-the-line, cutting-edge, very slightly bent- wait, slightly bent?

Customers on social media and several on the MacRumors forums have discovered their iPad Pros exhibited this slight bend straight out of the box.

Of course, Apple’s response was that this was completely normal, and absolutely not a defect.

Despite the publicity Apple gives its “ultra precise” quality manufacturing process, more and more issues like these are appearing. The bendy iPad Pro is looking less like an exception, and more like an increasingly problematic trend.

Here’s a comprehensive quality breakdown (quite literally) of the iPad Pro in question:

It’s interesting to note that while Apple is bragging about premium materials such as the sapphire camera lens cover, tests like the scratch durability test done in the video above pose glaring questions to Apple’s quality standards.

Other quality management blunders from Apple’s recent track record include:

That’s a lot of issues for a company that continues to charge top dollar, push prices up, and boast a reputation as a pioneer in quality assurance.

Obviously, and for whatever reason, there is a problem somewhere in Apple’s quality management process.

Quality control and management is important to ensure the customer gets the value they deserve, and quality management standards like those defined by the ISO 9000 family exist to make quality management work better.

Although Apple has received certification for ISO 27001 (an information security management standard), it doesn’t appear that they have any ISO 9000 certification for quality management. Who knows, if they had, perhaps they wouldn’t have so many QC issues?

In this article, I’ll be looking at the ISO 9000 family of quality management standards, breaking down the basics and giving you a few free checklist templates to get you started with your own quality management system.

Here’s exactly what I’ll be covering:

• What is ISO 9000?
• What is ISO 9001?
• ISO 9000 for quality management systems
• Why is ISO 9000 important?
• Benefits of ISO 9000
• ISO 9000 certification
• Implementing ISO 9000 with Process Street
• Free ISO 9000 templates
• Relevant ISO/SOP articles

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If you’re manufacturing food, drinks, or medicine, you know you have a sea of regulations and standards which you need to hit and adhere to.

You knew that starting out.

But it does leave you with two questions:

1. What are the regulations and standards that I should adhere to?
2. How do I get my organization to run in an effective manner so that we consistently adhere?

Lots of companies are very good at asking the first question, but the second sometimes gets overlooked.

This is how we end up with malpractice and lawsuits and all kinds of bad things.

You don’t just have to know what the standards are, or intend to reach those standards, but you have to consistently hit those standards in order to be the successful safe business you want to be.

That’s why in this Process Street article we’ll be looking at:

• What is CGMP? Current Good Manufacturing Practices explained
• What are the current Good Manufacturing Practices?
• What is a Quality Management System and how does it help CGMP?
• How Process Street can help you build your Quality Management System

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I moved house not too long ago.

Now, I’ve always been a pretty terrible record keeper in my own life.

To remedy this I tried the hoarder technique. If I thought something was even remotely important, I’d throw it in a box file and vow to come back to it one day in the future.

It was only when I came to moving, and thought I’d try to Marie Kondo my crap away, that I dug out all my box files and the piles of messy paper inside them.

I’ll be really honest with you – it’s not an approach to records management that I would recommend.

Your business probably creates exponentially more records than I do, so you certainly can’t use an unthought-out approach to records management either.

That’s why we’ve decided to take some of the basics of records management, explain them, and give you a series of actionable ways to get started taking control over the lifecycles of records in your company.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at:

• What is records management?
• Why is records management important?
• The 5 key steps to records management
• How to build a records management process

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What exactly is an “audit“?

The International Organization for Standardization defines it as:

“[the] systematic, independent and documented process for obtaining objective evidence and evaluating it objectively to determine the extent to which the audit criteria are fulfilled.” – ISO, from ISO 19011:2018 – Guidelines for Auditing Management Systems

That’s another way of saying someone takes a look at what you’re doing, gathers some evidence, and compares that evidence to what you’re supposed to be doing (in other words, a set of clearly documented requirements).

In the case of ISO, these requirements are known as standards. ISO 9001 is a standard. ISO 14001 is a standard.

Importantly, this understanding of audit implies that there are a few main things being considered by the auditor:

• What’s documented by the company (e.g. internal processes, policies, and SOPs)
• Evidence gathered to support how these policies, procedures, and SOPs are implemented in practice
• The requirements defined by the ISO standard being audited against (e.g. ISO 9001)

Audits performed by companies to assess and analyze their own management systems are known as internal audits. Many resources for guiding companies on how to perform internal audits exist, and foremost of these is the ISO 19011 standard.

For most management system standards, internal audits are an important requirement. Even guideline standards like ISO 26000 for social responsibility depend on reports to evidence the success of their implementations.

As such, ISO 19011 defines a set of guidelines; a framework for companies to plan, implement, and improve upon their audit programs, for auditing the implementation of management systems.

Since the first edition of ISO 19011 was published in 2002, many new management system standards have been published.

These standards often share a common structure, including certain requirements, terms, and definitions being used. That means ISO 19011 can be used to devise highly economic audit programs, wherein knowledge and processes can be shared and applied across various management systems.

By considering how they might take a broader approach to management system auditing and integration, companies implementing ISO management systems stand to save time, money, and confusion when preparing for and implementing internal audits.

The goal of this post is to provide a spring-board for understanding ISO 19011, and how to get started with internal ISO auditing. In this post, I’ll cover:

• What is ISO 19011
• 7 principles of ISO auditing
• Different types of ISO audit
• Key elements of an ISO audit
• 8 free ISO audit templates

If you just want the free ISO audit templates, then here they are:

• ISO 19011:2018 Checklist for Auditing Management Systems
• ISO 9001:2015 Audit Checklist for Quality Management Systems
• ISO 26000:2010 Social Responsibility Performance Assessment Checklist
• ISO 45001:2018 Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Audit Checklist
• ISO 27001:2013 Information Security Management System (ISO 27K ISMS) Audit Checklist
• ISO 14001 Environmental Management Self Audit Checklist
• ISO 9004:2018 for Sustainable Success in QMS Self Audit Checklist
• ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 Integrated Management System (IMS) Checklist

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In today’s business world, owners are constantly grappling with concerns and surmounting obstacles, the least of which is actually staying afloat financially in what can be an unforgiving economy.

However, the struggle to turn a profit pales in comparison to some of the harsher consequences of failing to comply with certain regulatory requirements.

Take HRIS broker Zenefits for example. Failure to comply with several licencing regulations issued by the California Department of Insurance landed them a $7million fine.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg; more severe penalties extend to include government bodies compelling you to dissolve your company, and ultimately the endangerment of the lives and well-being of individuals your organization is servicing.

“On a global scale, we are all being asked to do more with less—and for less. At some point soon, the current internal systems will not be able to hold back the deluge, and companies will be faced with a stark decision—consistently improve or perish” – Erik Myhrberg and Joseph Raciti, Practical Field Guide for ISO 13485

Often, these kinds of requirements take the form of the ISO 13485 standard for medical device manufacturers.

In this article, I’ll break down the ISO 13485 standard, from a basic introduction to suggestions and resources for implementing it in your business or organization.

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