Business Process Mapping Software
A Guide to Effective Business Process Mapping Software
When you’re focused on managing an organization, it’s often hard to step back and see that there might be a better way of doing things. When you’re unable to recognize the negative impacts of keeping a process the same because it’s what you’re used to, you miss out on opportunities to make improvements that impact your bottom line. Integrify’s business process mapping software helps companies find opportunities to turn their results in a more positive direction.
What is Business Process Mapping?
As dedicated as your workforce may be, it takes more than that to make significant improvements in the efficiency of your business processes. Even if they can recognize where changes need to happen, it helps to have a process in place that highlights the opportunities and risks that come with revamping your workflows. For example, something that may seem to have no impact on one department could bring a lot of fallout to another.
Business process mapping involves creating visualizations of your work processes and procedures. Think of it as coming up with a framework that gives you a high-level view of how things function in different areas.
You map out the different events involved in each process that affect your final output. Process mapping software typically allows users to accomplish this using flowcharts, diagrams, and symbols to visually organize the sequence of events in a business process.
Your end result should help answer critical questions that help move events forward, like:
- What are the tasks used to complete the process?
- Who’s responsible for completing each task?
- When should you complete each task?
- What prerequisites are needed to get started?
By having a business process map as your blueprint, you can define each step in a business workflow and better understand all the moving parts. From there, you can start spotting issues and figuring out how you can make corrections and avoid them going forward.
What are the Benefits of Business Process Mapping?
The clearer you are about your business operations, the better prepared you are to develop strategies that help reduce cost, save time, and simplify how things work. However, it’s difficult to accomplish that if you have employees who don’t fully understand their role in a work sequence. This can lead to them being out of alignment with an organization’s business goals.
Process mapping clears that confusion by providing clarity to everyone within the company, including management and line workers. That cuts down on the potential of mistakes that could impact profits. In addition, process mapping can lead to smoother business processes and more efficiency throughout the organization.
Tools like Integrify’s business process mapping software can help you with:
Defining organizational roles
You’d be surprised at how many workers, especially within larger organizations, have difficulty conveying the overall goals of their company or even their department. If your workforce doesn’t understand their impact on business processes, employees may come up with their way of doing things, leading to confusion and costly mistakes.
Using process mapping software to create transparent business workflows helps clarify the role everyone plays in specific processes. By establishing visuals that outline what’s expected of them, workers better understand the purpose of the work they’re tasked with and the importance of each step.
Establishing standardized processes
When you bring new people into your organization, it helps to have effective models that show them how to accomplish their work. Having an optimized business process map makes it easier to train workers on best practices as the basis for completing business functions. Having that uniformity helps set benchmarks for quality to apply across the organization.
Staying compliant
Companies that work in industries like finance and healthcare have specific regulations and compliance responsibilities by which they must abide. Any failure could lead to hefty fines and potential legal action against the organization. There can even be potential work hazards that threaten the welfare of employees.
For that reason, it’s crucial to have business process maps in place to ensure that workers consistently comply with standards across the board. They also come in handy as a way of establishing standards on how to handle audits.
How Do You Get Started with Business Process Mapping?
If this is your first time getting into business process mapping, you may feel tempted to try and map out every single business process at once. Instead, it’s better to pick one as a starting point. That way, you don’t have to start from the beginning with every function within your company. Instead, you can use your first process map as a basis for moving forward with others.
Focus on something critical to your organization that you can put firm metrics around to track. For example, you can look for a process that appears to be underperforming, one that’s customer-facing, or one that makes sense strategically to your business goals.
From there, start gathering information about your process, including:
- Each step involved
- Personnel responsible for carrying out the work
- The tasks assigned to everyone
- Who uses the process
- How the process flows
- What triggers changes to the process
You can use Integrify’s software to start building workflows that outline your business processes. Once you have the details nailed down, you can bring in the people involved in each activity to help you put the final process map together.
It’s also important to talk with business stakeholders and get their input. That way, you get an accurate picture of the problems they deal with each day versus making assumptions that might turn out to be incorrect.
Once you come up with your baseline map, you can start your analysis. Look for gaps and bottlenecks that represent opportunities for improvement. Keep your mind open to all possibilities, including the need to restructure the entire process to improve efficiency and meet company goals.
After putting your changes in place, keep monitoring the functions. Keep an eye out for issues that might not have come up before implementation. There may be a need to refine and optimize the process further.
Create Better Process Maps with Integrify
Integrify’s business software platform helps companies transform their operations by maximizing organizational efficiency. Contact us for more information or to set up a demo of our platform.
Map and Automate Any Business Process
To see how quickly you can begin automating your business processes, request a demonstration or trial of Integrify.
