In wealth management, precision isn’t optional. Atlas Fiduciary Financial,—founded in 2020 and managing a $220M+ portfolio—has rapidly become a trusted leader, offering fee-only, conflict-free guidance to high-net-worth clients.  However, as the firm scaled, their legacy CRM tools couldn’t handle the complexity of their financial services process management. They needed a modern solution that delivered process automation in financial services and true financial process management software capabilities. Continue Reading

Alarca Realty is a property management firm based in Charlotte, North Carolina, specializing in the full-service management of family homes, condominiums, townhouses, duplexes, and small multi-family developments.

We spoke with owner and CEO Bob Abbott to discuss how Alarca uses Process Street to improve the management and execution of property management workflows that keep their growing business running smoothly.

Streamline property management yourself with Process Street

Before we jump into Alarca’s story, check out the webinar video below. It’s a great resource for learning about how you can use Process Street to bolster your property management-related workflows, just like Alarca!

The Alarca Story

Founded in 2005, Alarca began with the mission of delivering world-class property management services in Charlotte and other locations in southwestern North Carolina.

Their focus on customer service and providing the highest return for clients has resulted in them achieving industry-leading client retention levels.

For many years, the company used a large library of spreadsheets to manage internal processes and track communication with clients.

As the company grew, so did their spreadsheets, and it soon became incredibly difficult and time-consuming to execute tasks as efficiently as they would like.

Bob identified this bottleneck, and after a period of significant research and testing, decided to go with Process Street to improve the way his team complete their day-to-day tasks and for him, as the manager, to gain greater insight into the progress of workflows.

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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!

Every team needs an agile process. Or two.

Maybe some teams can get by without strictly following documented processes every day, but when it comes to agile software development teams, it’s simply not an option to operate in the dark.

Since software is complex and easy to mess up, processes mean the difference between a great product and a crappy one. Without processes, software teams will spend more time squashing bugs and dealing with support headaches than they will actually developing the product…

The exact reason we created Process Street is to help businesses avoid that nightmarish cycle, and, of course, we use Process Street ourselves to help run the agile processes behind the scenes.

We use regular agile processes like:

• Daily standup meeting
• Sprint planning
• Sprint turnover
• Sprint retrospective

We also run routine QA processes like:

• GitHub pull request procedure
• Weekly WordPress maintenance
• SSL certificate renewal

And, finally, we have a set of training processes:

• Developer onboarding
• How to set up your development environment
• Pull request review failed procedure
• Pull request merge procedure

These are all regular tasks for the team, and the reason they were created was because we found they have a high margin for error.

Scroll down to find the exact processes we use.

If you want to tighten up the way your software team works, hit your sprint targets, and efficiently train new development hires, then this post will show you how. We even reveal the exact processes we use and a workflow diagram detailing the journey an issue takes from start to end.
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HR processes are hard and complex.

From hiring great-fitting talent and helping with their onboarding, to monitoring employee performance and even resolving any employee conflicts, there’s a lot of ground for HR teams to cover – and in such a short amount of time.

Imagine if there was a way for HR teams to time-save, cost-save, labor-save, and take control of their recurring tasks like never before…

Wouldn’t that be a dream?

At Process Street, we rather like turning dreams into reality. That’s why we’ve hand-picked our most effective, most useful HR processes from our extensive library and are presenting it in this ultimate HR process pack.

Think of it as your one-stop-shop for all the human resources processes you’ll ever need:

• Why use workflows for HR processes?
• HR processes #1: Pre-hiring processes
• HR processes #2: Hiring processes
• HR processes #3: Onboarding processes
• HR processes #4: Performance processes
• HR processes #5: Workplace processes
• HR processes #6: Diversity processes
• HR processes #7: Aptitude tests
• Create your own HR processes with Process Street today!

Now, let’s stop dilly-dallying and get to it!
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Did you know that job description templates can make your employee hunting 10x more efficient?

With the estimated cost of $4,129 for a new hire, it’s clear that that empty chair is an expensive one to fill. To make this cost more like an investment for your company than an expense, you want to get your hiring process right. You want to hire the ideal candidate, but where do you start?

At Process Street, we say you start your recruitment process by writing a solid job description. This is no easy task: you have around 14 seconds to convince applicants that your job is the perfect job for them.

Get your job description right and you can draw in the most qualified, skilled and well-fitting applicants. But how do you get your job description right?

We’ve covering what you need to know to start crafting the right job description for your needed role in this Process Street article. We’ve also provided you with 14 of the best job description templates for your company.

• What is a job description template and why do you need it?
• The 14 free job description templates your company needs
• Effortlessly create a killer description with Process Street​​

Let’s dive in!
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Are you in need of some workflow examples to make your teams smarter?

But what makes a team smart?

Several things do, but powerful workflows are one critical ingredient which makes teams smart.

Teams that use workflows don’t set goals and simply hope to reach them; they create checklists (workflows) to make sure they reach their goals.

No wonder 50% of businesses that use workflow management systems say the results are substantial.

It’s incredible.

Teams that use workflows are super organized and able to perform daunting tasks — no matter the long processes involved.

But what types of workflows should you be using this year?

It’s different for every organization; workflow systems are not always one-size-fits-all. But these nine Process Street workflow examples should give you inspiration for how you can build important systems to run your business with.

Our workflow examples:

1. Employee onboarding workflow
2. Customer support workflows
3. Customer onboarding workflows
4. Content marketing or writing workflows
5. Podcast publishing workflows
6. Request and approval workflows
7. Travel workflows
8. Content promotion workflow
9. Standup meeting workflows

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Would you agree to fly on a plane knowing that the crew was simply ‘told’ what to do but didn’t use clear guidelines and instructions?

Probably not.

Sadly, that is how many organizations operate today – without realizing that it may result in a wide range of negative consequences, from employee inefficiency to lost customers and profits.

Telling employees what to do is not nearly as effective as having a set of written step-by-step instructions they can follow, explaining how exactly routine operations should be performed. That’s where standard operating procedures, or SOPs, come in.

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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:

• Your free FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) template
• FMEA? What is Failure Mode and Effects Analysis?
• When do we use FMEA?
• Conducting and documenting Failure Mode and Effect Analysis: A user’s guide
• What happened to British Airways?
• Why did it happen?
• How can FMEA help us prevent this happening again?