Microsoft Visio is the industry standard for business process modeling, but you might want something different. Something a little more… agile. Just because it’s the most widely used, doesn’t mean it’s the best.

The main reason it’s so widely used is that it’s packaged with Office 365 and often comes pre-installed with enterprise tech suites.

If you’re tired of Visio’s lack of integration, lack of macOS compatibility, and sky-high price point, then you should consider investigating one of the many Visio alternatives out there (like Process Street!) and asking yourself what they can do for you.

There are a lot of options for different use cases; in this article, we’ll take a look at some of the best Visio alternatives and talk about why they might be a better choice.

Here’s a breakdown of the article:

• What is Microsoft Visio?
• What should business process modeling software be good at?
• Best Visio alternatives
• Using Process Street to implement business process modeling

You’re probably all-too-familiar with Microsoft Visio, but for the sake of clarity, let’s start with a quick overview.
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This is a guest post by Rahul Varshneya, the co-founder and President of Arkenea. Rahul has been featured as a technology thought leader in numerous media channels such as Bloomberg TV, Forbes, HuffPost, Inc, among others.

Several organizations use a wide range of tools to execute and monitor their internal processes. These systems are interfaced by human agents who pass on the data output from one system as input to the next system in the pipeline.

Because of the non-automatic nature of manual execution, manual data entry work makes these processes slow and error-prone.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had these interfaces taken care of automatically?

That’s right, we are talking about Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – a transformational paradigm that optimizes such processes by automating repetitive, rule-driven tasks.

According to Forrester Research, RPA market revenue is expected to gross $1 Billion USD in 2019.

With RPA and by using RPA tools, your internal processes can be finished faster and more efficiently. It would free your agents from trivial data entry and data exchange tasks so you could deploy them to do more strategic process initiatives.

In this article, we at Process Street will present 5 best practices for RPA. We will then introduce our favorite RPA tools, so you can walk away with actionable robotically automated processes.

This article has been structured as the following:

• How does Robotic Process Automation eliminate tasks from structured environments?
• Software silos and how they affect your teams
• How to break silos with the implementation of Robotic Process Automation
• How to achieve exceptional results with Robotic Process Automation implementation
• RPA tools: Process Street’s top four RPA tools
• How you can use Process Street’s RPA tool capabilities

Let’s get started!

Note that RPA does not aim to eliminate jobs. It aims to reduce the burden of mundane and repetitive tasks of the existing staff so they can work on more strategic initiatives.
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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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Automation has been one of the key emerging trends of the late 2010s, and will likely be a defining characteristic of the 2020s.

It’s something we’ve covered extensively at Process Street, and something we’ve taken huge advantage of internally as well.

The move from companies only providing enterprise-level API access to their software over to commercially available Internet of Things style mass integration has been a dramatic shift in the marketplace. This has opened up huge potential for individuals and small businesses; you can integrate with thousands of services in just a few clicks.

Now, so many services, SaaS products in particular, provide a means to integrate with other platforms that there are very little restrictions on what you can and cannot automate.

Tools like Zapier, Flow, and IFTTT have made these integrations so easy that anyone can set them up.

But they’re not the only ones – new connectors and middlemen are cropping up all the time, helping people without tech skills connect with APIs or Webhooks of their choosing. The No-Code Movement has gone mainstream and it now has a full suite of tools at its disposal.

Even in 2015, according to Chui, Manyika, and Miremadi writing in the Harvard Business Review, not only could a marketing executive be automating activities which account for between 10-15% of their current time using existing technology, but for 60% of existing US jobs, 30% of their time could be reduced by automation.

For those interested in that kind of thing, you should check out Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation by McKinsey. An illuminating text which is already somewhat out of date!

Here at Process Street, we integrate with thousands of other apps and platforms via our direct, agentic integration framework, we have large customers making use of our API, and we’ve now added webhooks to our array of automation options to try to cover the rest of the use cases our customers tell us about.

In this article, we’ll look at:

• What are webhooks?
• What do people use webhooks for?
• What is the difference between webhooks and APIs?
• How do I use webhooks?
• How do Process Street webhooks work?

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You click the ‘Contact Us’ page. Nothing happens. First, confusion, then familiar frustration. It was a mailto link. Your computer slows to a grinding halt as a huge, archaic desktop mail app rises from the depths of your hard drive. Checking that the date on your computer isn’t 15 years out, you wonder why mail integration isn’t standard… and what year is it exactly?

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There are many things that Process Street, our process management platform, can be used for including onboarding new clients or launching a website. But an interesting use case that has cropped up recently is using Process Street for managing podcast releases.

Many podcast publishers run a checklist to help them manage the recording, publishing and promoting of each podcast episode. Checklists are a great tool to make sure things get done right, and since Process Street is the ultimate recurring checklist software, it only makes sense that podcasters would gravitate towards our platform.

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The Rise of Instagram

Instagram is the fastest growing social network. It has more users than Twitter and is an amazing tool for driving traffic and sales. Take a look at this guy who sold $4,000 worth of neckties in one day on Instagram.

Photo and Image Credit

Here are some more stats on the rise of Instagram from Search Engine Journal.

• Multi-platform use is on the rise: 52% of online adults now use two or more social media sites, a significant increase from 2013, when it stood at 42% of internet users.
• For the first time, more than half of all online adults 65 and older (56%) use Facebook. This represents 31% of all seniors.
• For the first time, roughly half of internet-using young adults ages 18-29 (53%) use Instagram. And half 0f all Instagram users (49%) use the site daily.
• For the first time, the share of internet users with college educations using LinkedIn reached 50%.
• Women dominate Pinterest: 42% of online women now use the platform, compared with 13% of online men.

If you’re hungry for more data, you can view the comprehensive 4-page report right here.

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Assigning team members to their tasks is a duty which is as vital as it is tedious.

Everyone pretty much knows what they should be doing, so there’s no need to directly assign them to everything when you could be spending time on more important tasks, right?

Wrong.

Human error (of which memory plays a huge part) affects 1/100 routine tasks where care is needed. This means that the people responsible either makes a mistake or forgets what they need to do (hence why documented processes are so important).

That’s why we here at Process Street have a role assignment feature in our checklists.

Role assignments let you dictate who each task in your process checklists needs to be assigned to without fail every time. All you need to do is set up the role which will have the task assigned, then Process Street does the rest.

Ready to assign your tasks without fail, fuss or tedious fiddling? Then let’s dive right in.

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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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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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