Process Mapping: Why You Need it for Your Business
It’s never a great idea to “wing it” when it comes to running a business. Process mapping takes away the guess work and allows unified standards to be used throughout.
How many times have your struggled with your colleagues' working styles? It’s easy to feel annoyed when we just don’t understand how they work. This is where business process mapping comes to the rescue. This process provides a graphic layout to ensure all of your employees and colleagues have the same vision and can perform tasks in the same way.
Let’s dive into the types of business process mapping, how to execute on process mapping, the benefits of process mapping, and tips for using this method.
Types of Business Process Mapping
There are a lot of types of process mappings that you can use to layout the process, details of activities, documents, roles, and strategies. The following are the most common types of business process mapping used in corporations.
Flowcharts
Flow charts are a graphic illustration of your company’s processes. They are used to represent the company's organization charts, the hierarchy of positions, process of operations, and more. You can use flow charts for nearly anything.
There are a few different types of flowcharts as well:
Top-Down Flowchart: These charts show the steps of a particular process, clustering them together in a single flow.
Deployment Flowchart: A top-down flowchart that is expanded to show the details of who is performing what task.
Detailed Flowchart: This flowchart, further illustrates details on the top-down and deployment flowchart.
Value Stream process Mapping
Value stream mapping helps in showing the current state of a certain process and with designing the future of that process.
Data Flow Diagram
This chart simply is a flowchart that shows the process of data through a system.
Swimlane Diagram
This diagram is a cross-functional map that shows details of sub-processes. This subprocess can be details of responsibilities in a process or something else.
State Diagram
This mapping process is used to show the behavior of systems in a unified modeling language.
How to do Business Process Mapping?
For you to understand how to do business process mapping, you first need to understand a few of its basic principles.
Define what the project is about. What is its scope? What are the starting and ending points of the project? And lastly, what are the boundaries that you would need to enforce?
What is your vision for process mapping? What is the intent of the process. Show your employees the bigger picture.
List down each step clearly.
List down the details for each step with precision and clarity.
Consult with everyone in the organization who is involved in the process. Listen to their feedback.
Keep the processes and the sub-processes simple and easy to understand.
Test the process mapping, note down the metrics, and then see the results to ensure quality adaption of the process.
Keep the process flexible and redesign it to make it more customer-centric if necessary.
Make your process tech-friendly.
Benefits of Business Process Mapping
Here are some of the benefits of business process mapping:
1. It ensures that every person involved follows the same process.
2. It reduces chances of error.
3. It helps to build understanding between cross-functional departments.
4. Everyone can see the vision clearly and also the current state of the process
5. It ensures the development of metrics
6. Based on metrics, you can quickly correct your mistakes to ensure a smooth process.
Tips for Business Process Mapping
The following tips will help you with building your process mapping for whatever procedure necessary:
Use process mapping for the right processes. For example, you do not need process mapping to make a decision. Instead, you can use it to layout the process of delivery or operations.
You should be clear on what the focus of your mapping is. Are you looking for efficient processing within your firm or is there any outside element that is ruining your process?
In cross-functional mapping, make sure you highlight the leading party.
You can get professionals to help with the mapping for you.
Fully map the process, and then work on fixing it once you have the bigger picture in front of you.
There can be errors in your mapping, give room to yourself to fix these faults.
Hammad Awan is studying computer science from virtual university. He is a professional Guest Blogger at Mediahicon and loves to write blogs on valuable topics.