Processes are key for business effectiveness and productivity
Vinay starts by stating that a company without processes will lose track of its activity and information will be lost amongst the team.
Running remote teams allows companies to resort to an expert workforce that presents lower costs than most times a local team, and that does not mean exploring or paying low fees, yet leveraging lower cost of living in other geographies to foster ones` business.
Process street resulted from a personal pain point that Vinay had with regards to properly track work accomplishment out of a scattered team since he often had to do overtime that allowed him to interact with team members who literally live across the world.
Having tried several market solutions which did not cover the full scope of his need, the decision was to create a tool that would.
Why is it so hard for business owners to document their companies’ processes
As large companies do it for several orders of reasons, SMEs usually don’t. Large companies are managed by experienced and certified people who have a huge backlog which allows them to set proper processes in place and document them/ track their effectiveness, whereas the great majority of SMEs are not steered by people with process design background and training or even business school frequency. In fact, usually, they are an expert in some area who has decided to develop a business within that specific market vertical area.
Then, the life of a startup business owner is not easy by a long shot, the owner has to de-multiply itself in several areas like checking the accounting, dealing with clients, taking care of HR and so on and so forth … and then systematizing the operational processes lays consecutively to a second layer of priority which is never reached.
Drawing and optimizing processes also are perceived as something that does not directly contribute to revenue and therefore it is (even in large corporations) considered as an overhead activity.
The client profile
Mostly (90%), Process Street serves small businesses, from 5 to 50 employees and then there is a residual footprint in large companies.
The documentation related problem also grows as the company is bigger.
Vinay focuses on clients that have executable processes, meaning the ones that will use the established work processes as a work tool and not let them fall into oblivion as a nice document that adds no value to the business.
Considering a concrete example like a video blog post, there are some points along the work process that may represent bottlenecks and it is relevant to continuously assess what can be changed that will lead to improving the overall initiative, making it error free, faster and therefore more effective.
Developing and setting processes in place
Process street has expert partners in several geographies who can support clients to develop their own processes and then configure them into the platform.
However, experience dictates that companies with less than 20 employees won’t gather a cost-benefit experience out of resorting to such type of consulting.
The platform is widely used inhouse towards several processes from sales to marketing and operational topics.
Integrability
Process Street directly integrates with Zapier as well as there is an API that clients may use to directly exchange data between their corporate systems and the tool.
The tool focuses on simplicity and not falling into the temptation of becoming a wide and complex platform, therefore the goal is not to compete with large corporation established complex offering portfolios, but to allow easy and intuitive ways for clients to work with.
Having lean minimal high-value processes set in place, to begin with, help to successfully start leveraging company processes in SMEs