Awesome Process Management

A curated list of the best resources about business process management, Lean, Six Sigma, and continuous improvement for operations leaders and business executives.

Inspired by awesome lists. Maintained by Rework.

Contents

Articles

Good process management is not about bureaucracy. It's about making quality, speed, and consistency reproducible without relying on heroics from specific people. These are the articles that capture that distinction.

Books

  • The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt - A novel that teaches the Theory of Constraints through a factory manager's fight to save his plant.
  • Lean Thinking by James Womack & Daniel Jones - The foundational text for applying Toyota's production philosophy outside manufacturing.
  • The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker - A deep study of the 14 management principles behind Toyota's sustained operational excellence.
  • Work the System by Sam Carpenter - How a struggling business owner documented his processes and reclaimed control of his company.
  • The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande - Why the simplest process tool - a checklist - prevents catastrophic failures in surgery, aviation, and business.

Videos & Talks

Tools & Software

These platforms cover the range from lightweight process documentation to full BPM automation suites used at enterprise scale.

  • Lucidchart - Diagramming tool for process maps, swimlane diagrams, and BPMN notation with collaboration features.
  • Miro - Visual collaboration platform widely used for process mapping workshops and value stream mapping.
  • Bizagi - BPM platform for modeling, automating, and monitoring business processes with BPMN support.
  • Camunda - Open-source BPMN-based workflow automation for technical teams embedding process orchestration in software.
  • Nintex - Process management and automation platform for organizations standardizing on Microsoft 365.
  • Pega - Enterprise low-code platform for automating complex business processes and case management.
  • Process Street - Lightweight SOP and checklist management tool for teams running recurring processes without code.
  • Creately - Visual workspace for process documentation, org charts, and collaborative process design.

Templates & Frameworks

  • Process Mapping Template (Swimlane) by Lucidchart - A ready-to-use swimlane diagram template for mapping cross-functional process flows and handoffs.
  • SOP Document Template by Process Street - A structured template for writing standard operating procedures that teams will actually follow.
  • SIPOC Diagram Template by Miro - Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, Customers - the starting point for any process improvement project.
  • Process Improvement Charter by iSixSigma - A one-page document to define scope, goals, team, and timeline before starting any improvement project.
  • Business Process Management via Rework - A practical walkthrough of the full BPM lifecycle - design, model, execute, monitor, and optimize - with guidance on which phase most organizations are actually failing at.

Case Studies & Real-World Examples

Process improvement doesn't always require consultants or new software. These examples show what the work actually looks like - and why the results are often surprisingly large relative to the intervention.

  • Toyota - The Toyota Production System, refined over decades from the 1950s through the 1980s, eliminated seven categories of waste (muda) across its manufacturing lines and is credited with enabling Toyota to achieve defect rates 100x lower than US competitors at the time of the 1984 NUMMI joint venture with GM. When NUMMI applied TPS principles to GM's worst-performing plant in Fremont, California, quality improved from the bottom to the top of GM's network within two years using the same workers. The case established that process, not workforce, determines output quality. Source

  • Virginia Mason Medical Center - Applied Toyota's Lean principles to healthcare operations beginning in 2002, reducing medication errors by 74% and cutting surgical instrument inventory costs by $1 million in the first year. The hospital systematically mapped patient care as a "production" process and used Kaizen events to eliminate steps that added waiting time without clinical value. It became one of the first hospitals to win quality awards typically reserved for manufacturers. Source

  • Motorola / General Electric - Motorola invented Six Sigma in 1986 to address manufacturing defect rates, achieving $16 billion in savings over 11 years. When Jack Welch mandated Six Sigma across all of GE in 1995, the company reported $10 billion in benefits over 5 years. Both cases demonstrate that statistical process control - not just intuition - can reduce defects systematically. But they also show the limitation: GE's aggressive financial engineering eventually masked operational problems that Six Sigma couldn't fix at the business model level. Source

  • Amazon Fulfillment Centers - Built their warehouse operations on continuous process improvement cycles, using real-time data dashboards to identify bottlenecks in picking, packing, and shipping within hours rather than days. Amazon's fulfillment cost per unit dropped by roughly 40% between 2006 and 2015 while processing volume grew by over 1,000%. The efficiency came from standardized processes with built-in feedback loops, not from worker speed alone. Source

  • McDonald's - Built the most replicated process management system in food service history by treating each restaurant task - from grill temperature to bun storage time - as an engineering problem rather than a cooking problem. The 1960s Speedee Service System, later evolved into the modern operations manual, enabled McDonald's to maintain consistent quality across 40,000+ locations in 100+ countries with frontline workers who receive minimal training. This is the canonical example of process design reducing dependence on individual skill. Source

  • Zappos - Documented every customer service interaction as a process improvement input, treating call center data as operational intelligence rather than just a cost. The result was a decrease in average handle time alongside an increase in customer satisfaction scores - an unusual combination that typically trade off against each other. Zappos's process of empowering agents to make decisions without scripts was itself a process: a structured framework for unstructured conversations. Source

Communities & Newsletters

  • APQC Community - A network of 250,000+ process and performance management practitioners sharing benchmarks and best practices.
  • Lean Enterprise Institute - The hub for Lean thinking education, including articles, workshops, and a global practitioner network.
  • Process Excellence Network - PEX Network covers Lean, Six Sigma, BPM, and digital transformation through articles, webinars, and events.

Rework Resources

Contributing

Know a great resource that belongs on this list? Let us know.

Last updated: March 2026. Links verified. Bridges formal BPM methodology with practical everyday process improvement.