Whether you want to reduce your environmental impact, be more efficient, or reduce your expenses to Dunder Mifflin, going paperless is a really positive step forward for your business.

Operating in a paperless office means all activity and work is recorded and can be easily found. It means you can send work over to other colleagues in seconds. It means you don’t need huge filing cabinets taking up valuable space.

It’s just better in many many ways.

Even if you want to keep paper as a small part of your life, taking the necessary steps toward a paperless office will yield results.

So how do we create a paperless office?

The answer is in the tools you choose to use for your business. Any business may have specialist tools specific to their industry, but we’ve tried to pick out 7 tools which can collectively cover almost all aspects of a company’s operations.

You’ve got your email, word processing, spreadsheets, databases, kanban boards, BPM software, accounting, software development, automation, communication, and funny gif sending software. And that’s just the start of what these tools can achieve.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to go through each one by one and give you an introduction. Some tools you might already be familiar with, but I’m sure at least one will be new!

Here are our paperless office quicklinks:

• GSuite
• Process Street
• Airtable
• Quickbooks
• Phabricator
• Zapier
• Slack

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This is a guest post from Kyle Anderson; a freelance tech journalist whose typical day is spent scouring the web for the latest developments in the world of business tools and software. He loves any type of software that automates his life! For his pastimes, he is an avid lover of travelling, poetry, and photography.

When it comes to prospecting and the wider sales process, there’s never a shortage of tools you can use to make your work easier and more efficient. One of the most versatile of them is Outlook, a Microsoft tool that is popularly known for email and business calendar management.

However, Outlook is not limited to just these two functions.

You can easily unlock its hidden power by integrating it with compatible add-ins and other extensions. In the end, you’ll be able to complete a broad range of business functions including market/customer research, communication with your clients, document sharing, accounting, and more.

In this Process Street post, we take a look at how you can run a successful outreach campaign for your sales cycle using Outlook and its supported add-ins.

We’ll cover:

• Lead qualification Outlook Add-ins
• Email template Outlook Add-ins
• Meeting scheduling Outlook Add-ins
• Contract signing Outlook Add-ins
• Accounting and invoicing Outlook Add-ins

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We all know processes are important.

Having a clear set of processes or procedures for repetitive or recurring tasks is a crucial way to make sure your output is the best it can be every time.

Those set game plans for how to approach a task can also help you to improve the way you approach those tasks.

Part of that improvement process can be automating elements of the flow to boost reliability and efficiency.

The world of IT provides us with a clear example of the vast efficiency benefits which can be achieved through carefully mapping tasks and seeking to improve the process which ties them together.

One such example is runbook automation, and in this Process Street article we’re going to look at:

• What is runbook automation?
• How do companies use runbook automation?
• What can we learn from runbook automation to improve other teams?
• How Process Street can help you automate set procedures

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“Airtable vs Trello. Which is better?“

Our team had been using Trello for years and had only recently undergone a transition to Airtable. We were having a tough time adjusting (old habits die hard), and my Process Street colleague Ben Brandall was trying to get to the bottom of why.

We love improving our productivity using everything from business process automation to focus music, and this case was no different.

Trello is a powerhouse of task management but Airtable is a masterful mix of database, spreadsheet, task and project management app. How are you supposed to choose?

That’s why I’m writing this post. After having used both apps personally and professionally for more than three years, I’ve been able to get to grips with who these apps are designed for and what makes them useful.

Most of all, you can learn from this to see which app would suit you instead of spending years testing them out yourself.

Let’s get started.

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Have you ever wished you could get some of those pesky work tasks done more easily while on the move, or out-and-about? Those routine tasks and emails that take so much time out of your day, that you would give an arm and a leg to be able to automate?

Or, picture this: you easily send a quick follow-up email, record meeting notes in real time, create new projects, send surveys, schedule meetings, and much more by simply talking to Siri.

You can do all of this and more with Shortcuts for iOS 12 in combination with Siri and Process Street, using the power of Zapier integrations.

Shortcuts, formerly known as Workflow, puts Siri in the control seat of your business workflows, with more power and usefulness than ever before. Using custom phrases recorded and added to Siri’s library of voice gestures, you can trigger a series of actions across multiple apps.

There are two ways to use Shortcuts. The best option is the Shortcuts app itself, which is where you can create your own workflows from scratch. The app also comes with a gallery of suggested shortcuts curated by Apple. Separate from this, Siri will recommend shortcuts based on your daily iPhone activity. You can see these in Settings under Siri & Search.

Here’s a quick list of all of the ideas I’ll be covering in this post, before we dive in:

• 1. Dictate meeting notes straight to your CRM
• 2. Send an electronic contract when timing is crucial
• 3. Master your calendar in an instant
• 4. Kickstart your client onboarding process
• 5. Get paid faster by sending your invoices ASAP
• 6. Assign your team members on the go
• 7. Grab and archive snapshots of your working screen-space during a technical audit
• 8. Jump straight back into your drafts, anywhere, any time
• 9. Dictate an email to your assistant
• 10. Manage your tasks with a dynamic to-do list

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Automation is on everyone’s lips right now.

And for good reason.

Deciding to automate tasks in your workflow can free you to focus on the things you want to be doing – the things which really create value for your business.

According to a report from McKinsey, Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation, 15% of the average marketing executive’s time could be automated using existing commercially available tools and software.

Think of the productivity gains available if you could implement that company-wide.

More startling: that report is probably out of date.

Automation technologies are moving at such an incredible rate that new opportunities are appearing all the time. In this article, I’ll run you through a number of our real-life use cases for simple things in our business which we automate to either save time or improve processes.

Here’s a quick overview:

• Automatically launch actions like Process Street checklists from moving Trello cards
• Use dictation software to write at a higher speed and with less effort
• Tweets containing our domain are automatically posted in Slack so we can see feedback in real time
• Meeting notes are automatically posted in our Slack channel to update the rest of the team about the results of any meeting
• Posting in Slack to automatically create a new entry line in our Airtable database
• To book meetings we use Calendly connected with Google Calendar to make sure one-off meetings always occur when someone is available.

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Universal Modeling Language (UML) is a way of visualizing a software program using a collection of diagrams. That is perhaps the simplest way to define it.

If you’re looking for a full-winded definition, here it is:

“The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was created to forge a common, semantically and syntactically rich visual modeling language for the architecture, design, and implementation of complex software systems both structurally and behaviorally.” – Lucidchart, What is Unified Modeling Language

UML has many advantages including flexibility, an abundance of tools, and the capacity to model systems from both a structural and behavioral perspective.

Nevertheless, it can sometimes be overwhelming.

A focus on simplicity is, therefore, essential to not only creating actionable diagrams, but also to avoid pulling your hair out in the process!

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We now have the world in our pockets. Our TVs are smart. Our cars soon to be driverless.

We live in the tech futures of 1970s futurists, or at least partly.

Along with predictions of technological development came ideas of utopias and dystopias. The technology we craft creates new use cases, opportunities, and dangers. The tech and its application cannot be separated.

This brings us to larger questions of how we should employ technology, what risks new tech may bring, and what the arrival of these new futures means to us as humans on our little ball of dirt.

This is the sphere of digital ethics.

Process Street was invited to the inaugural World Ethical Data Forum, and it has set our minds rolling over some of these questions and the discussions of what may lie ahead.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What is digital ethics?
• 3 current hot topics in digital ethics
• 3 challenges discussed at the World Ethical Data Forum
• What to look out for in the future of digital ethics

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The best techniques and technology in the world won’t help you if you don’t know how to use them. Annoyingly, with it being so new, it’s hard to tell what machine learning marketing use cases there are to base your efforts on.

In other fields, the breakthrough tech is being used in medical diagnoses, spam filtering, fraud detection, translation and more. All you need is some inspiration to get started with your own uses.

That’s why this post exists.

I’ll cover, in detail, the key ways machine learning is affecting marketing, and how it can be used to handle some of your business process automation, provide actionable data insights and predictions, and even win $1 million on Jeopardy.

Before that though, if you don’t know what machine learning is (or want a refresher), check out our other posts on the topic below:

• An Introduction to Machine Learning in Business: Analyzing Your Success
• 6 Useful Applications of AI & Machine Learning in Your Business Processes

Let’s get started.

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Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain.

Together, these various buzzwords form a distributed ledger of hype!

The potential for a new decentralized world has led investors, writers, bankers, entrepreneurs and more to herald various versions and aspects of this new technology as representing the future of humanity.

A World Economic Forum survey even suggested that 10% of global GDP would be stored on the blockchain by 2027.

There is a lot of excitement about the direction the technology is heading, but the tech behind Bitcoin has existed for a while now and we’re yet to see much mainstream integration of it.

Which begs the question: what can the blockchain be used for?

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What is the blockchain?
• 5 use cases where the blockchain could thrive
• How the blockchain could be utilized in business process management

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