Workflow Diagrams and Charts
What is a Workflow Diagram and How Are They Produced?
What is a workflow?
Let us start by defining what exactly we mean by "a workflow". There are several definitions on the web, but for our purpose, we have chosen a simple dictionary definition of a workflow as being:
‘The sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion.’
From this definition, we can identify that three parameters further describe each workflow component or step:
- Input
- Transformation
- Output
Workflow needs to be performed by someone or something; these are termed resources such as people, machines, or software. It is the resources that make the workflow happen.
A business workflow is a repeatable process that consists of a series of tasks that generally need to be completed in a specific sequence. Think of it as work flowing from one stage to the next until it is finished. Workflows help ensure that essential processes are done the right way every time. A good example is the assembly of a motor car. The components parts are added to the vehicle’s chassis in sequential stages, such as counting the engine and transmission, the bodywork, the seats, interior fittings, and the wheels until the finished car rolls off the assembly line.
What is a workflow diagram?
A workflow diagram, sometimes called a workflow chart, is a visual representation of a business process (or workflow), usually done through a flowchart. It is a visual way for business analysis to show how work gets accomplished. Workflows are composed of symbols that show how various workers perform tasks and interact with each other and how information (data) flows through the business area. It may also identify individual responsibility for each step in the process.
Workflows can also be documented by numbered sequential steps or in a checklist form. This method is well suited for detailing a specific task or activity in the process or a simple sub-process. However, it is not suitable for a complicated process where a parallel action or decision points may be multiple outputs or sub-processes for the complete (end-to-end) process cycle.
Often, workflow diagrams are created to document and share a process, improve the way a process is done, for workflow analysis or prepare a process for automation.
As the adage goes, "a picture paints a thousand words." This concept equally applies to using workflow diagrams and workflow charts to provide a visual representation or overview of a business process.
The origins of workflows can be traced back, unsurprisingly, to Henry Gantt. Yes, the same person responsible for the Gantt chart. The industrial revolution was the catalyst for intelligent thinkers like Gantt to develop efficient ways of organizing a workforce.
Workflow Diagram Examples
There are numerous types of diagrams that are used to visualize the workflow. Some of these diagrams have been around for a long time and come in many varieties. Let’s look at some workflow diagram examples. Some of the most popular ones are:
- ANSI flowchart: This style grew out of flowcharting in the 1970s and became the first standard for workflows. The symbols came out of the American National Standards Institute (hence, ANSI). Many people still use the symbols today, often to show work being accomplished. For example, an ANSI flowchart may show how an employee’s payroll is calculated, processed, and approved for payment.
- Swimlane: A swim lane diagram is a type of flowchart that delineates who does what in a process. Using the metaphor of lanes in a pool, a swim lane diagram clarifies and accountability by placing process steps within the horizontal or vertical “swim lanes” of a particular employee, workgroup, or department. This workflow diagram focuses on interactions between organizational units and can expose bottlenecks and process inefficiencies.
- UML Activity: This diagram arose from UML (Unified Modelling Language). It operates like a flowchart and shows different steps and ordered tasks and the flow of control.
- BPMN: Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a standard created for the business rather than application development. In other words, it focuses on graphically presenting business processes and information rather than solutions.
- IDEF Diagram: IDEF (Integrated Definition) is a graphical technique in process simulation used to apply processes and engineering applications. IDEF was first conceived by the United States Air Force and further developed in the mid-1970s. It was developed as a primary tool for recording business processes and evaluating them. This technique is used as a rigid framework for the study of an organization, capturing “as-is” process models and business operations simulation.
- SSD Flowchart: The Structured Systems Design approach is process-oriented, aiming to break a large complex project into a series of smaller, more manageable modules or functions.
- Geographic diagrams: These diagrams are commonly used in warehousing and logistics to show objects’ placement concerning workers. For example, a geographic diagram would mandate that the most-commonly ordered products be placed closest to the shipping station. The least-commonly ordered products are placed farthest from the shipping dock and highest up on the racks.
- SIPOC: SIPOC stands for “Supplier–Input–Process–Output–Customer.” Used primarily in Six Sigma, this diagram shows who creates the data details the high-level process, and depicts who receives it.
- Data Flow Diagram: This type of chart shows the flow of data between the different entities and data stored in a system, while a flow chart shows the steps involved to carry out a task. In a sense, the data flow diagram provides a very high-level view of the system. System developers, rather than process analysts use these.
Listed below are common workflow diagram examples of some of these flowcharts:
An example of ANSI Type workflow chart, with elements of SSD.
A high-level process flow using ANSI standardized symbols.
An example of a swim lane workflow diagram in a horizontal layout style.
An example of a swim lane workflow diagram in a vertical layout style.
Example of BPMN Type workflow chart.
Example of IDEF Workflow Diagram.
Why not create your workflow diagram and then use it to automate your processes?
You can do it in Integrify.
What are the benefits of a Workflow Diagram?
Workflow diagrams and workflow charts provide an easy visual means of documenting and then analyzing a business process or sub-process.
A workflow diagram demonstrates all the significant steps of a process or business unit. It helps you understand the big picture and relationships between different actions and work functions, locates critical stages of the process or business unit, and identifies potential improvement opportunities.
Some of the benefits of workflow and process diagrams are:
Improved communication
Using workflow charts and other flowcharts as part of process documentation empowers entire teams to collaborate as they create, edit and analyze their processes using flowcharts.
Studies have shown that communication in the workplace is critical because it affects every aspect of the company. Flowcharts provide the tool for communicating and providing visibility of the organization’s processes.
Communication using flowcharts makes day-to-day operations smoother with clear responsibility lines and ultimately leads to fewer errors, a better-informed workforce, and reduced employee turnover.
Documentation
A key member of the team leaves, and suddenly, the process no longer works. In many organizations, the processes are only reviewed or analyzed when there are problems, or the process has become cumbersome or no longer working effectively.
Documentation of the process avoids these pain points as newcomers can be inducted into the position with a run-through of the existing process documentation.
The documentation can also provide awareness of the organization's ‘Big Picture’ of who does what and where a particular role fits the overall process.
Finally, documentation provides a quality assurance process to ensure that optimum products or services are being offered to your customers or clients.
Capability for practical analysis of the process leading to improvement opportunities.
Precise and up-to-date documentation of the current processes provides an opportunity for problem-solving when things do not run smoothly or when an analysis is required due to a change of policy or circumstances or application of new technologies.
Unfortunately, because a business evolves, unnecessary and redundant tasks creep into the work practices that take place daily. Once you have more insights into your processes, you can determine what activities are essential while identifying and eliminating redundant, non-value-adding tasks and activities. This, of course, has countless benefits and creates value for your business.
Provide better customer service
We all know that without our customers, there is no business to run.
So, it is essential to constantly find ways to align our processes to the customers’ needs. After all, we are all in business to satisfy our customers and clients. Unfortunately, customer requests or complaints can be easily overlooked when relying on people remembering the process. A key measure in the process evaluation should be customer feedback and complaints management.
Provides an opportunity to become more efficient and increase profitability.
Mapping out your processes in a workflow allows you to get a more precise, top-level view of your business. Even if you have a well-established set of business processes, do you know if they deliver you results? Are the processes as good as they could be? Think about how your business might benefit from following proven workflow diagram examples in order to streamline and optimize all your varied processes. Time is money, and efficient workflows save you time.
One of the biggest reasons why workflow is important is because it gives you greater insight into your processes. Using the insights from the workflows provides an opportunity to become efficient and improve its bottom line.
How do I create a workflow chart?
The famous process expert Edwards Deming once quoted, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” That quote merits some further discussion. What does it mean to describe what you are doing as a process?
Typically, workflow diagrams are created during the process discovery phase of a project, where the first step is usually to map out the existing processes. In the process mapping, we need to conduct the following activities:
- Conduct a series of workshops with a cross-section of staff from the current owners, users, and approvers of the existing process. The objective of these workshops will be to map out the current process. It may require a number of these workshops to document the critical process and its variations entirely.
- Follow-up one to one meetings, as required for:
- Variations, deviations, and possible bottlenecks
- further data collection such as lead times
- Understanding of existing technology applications
- Purpose of approvals and identifying the input of critical skills.
- Develop the current process document and the variations to the primary process. Ensure to obtain buy-in/agreement from the participants.
From the process mapping activities, we can create workflow diagrams for the processes.
To develop each workflow diagram, the following step by step approach is helpful:
- Describe what you are doing as a series of steps. Perhaps the most self-evident element of a process is the sequence. Something comes; first, something else comes second, and so on. If there is some order that appeals to you, that structure tells you something about the activity as a process.
- Identify the inputs and outputs. Every process requires something that goes into it, whether raw materials, information, or energy. Every process generates products and sometimes by-products, which may come at the end or anywhere during process execution.
- Determine what usually goes wrong. It might seem like looking for failures is the opposite of process-oriented thinking, but you must have had some experience with the process if you know what kinds of mistakes commonly crop up. This can also point to areas in the process where more details may be required.
- Document what you learned and tested it with someone else. Once you have described what you are doing as a process, give your process documentation to someone else and see how they do. Typically one of the key players from the user group (people working in the process) can be very useful for this feedback loop to ensure that you have documented what happens.
Specialist flowcharting software is not a prerequisite for developing the workflow diagrams. It is sometimes better to keep things simple and use sticky notes on a board to elicit the information from those working. Once the information has been gathered, analysts can use the software to produce the visuals. There is an abundant array of tools available for this, from office productivity tools such as MS Office. Yes, MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have the charting capability. Another popular tool specifically for creating workflows and charts is MS Visio. These have sufficient capability for almost all workflow diagram creation for standalone usage.
All the BPM software products also have workflow diagramming capability. The benefits of using the built-in capability are that they can then be used to analyze and move to full process automation.
Examples of Tools for Creating Workflow Diagrams
How do I automate a workflow?
An automated workflow identifies tasks performed by employees and automates them with tools, apps, and technology.
There are a host of tasks that consume time and are repetitive in any organization. Examples include lead management, data input, follow-up emails, and even human resource management and marketing. Switching a manual task to a self-operating workflow process not only saves your business money but also removes the risk of human error when set up correctly.
There are several drivers for adopting workflow automation. Some of the most common include:
- Efficiency
- Data and task accuracy
- Productivity
Business processes in various business functions can be automated, including marketing, finance, human resource management, and operations, by applying automated workflows.
The best way to illustrate automating a workflow is to take an example. Let us consider the onboarding process for a new employee in an HR function.
When a new hire comes on board, a team member must manually input all their details into the company’s systems and records. The list can be vast: personal information, tax details, addresses, payroll details, skills & competency details. Other people may also enter this same information in the organization into medical & insurance records, expense accounts, and many more. The same or similar data is entered into several records and systems by different people with lots of room for human errors.
By automating this workflow, not only can your company free up time for the employees tasked with inputting all this data, but it ensures your database record is a lot more accurate, creating a single source of the truth. (The same data populating the array of records).
Workflow automation software allows you to do this by understanding your current processes, using the workflow diagrams, and creating a future state process that is automated by the software. I.e., You create routines, rules, and logic in the automation software to take your new hire data and populate all your systems automatically.
This is shown in the workflow diagram below:
By correctly implementing automation of this onboarding process, we can:
- Improve productivity due to quick processing and data sharing
- Cut storage/printing costs that come along with paper-based HR processes.
- Make sure the company remains compliant with policies and procedures.
- Boost your company’s growth through more efficient hiring. i.e., less time spent onboarding a new hire
- Provide time to analyze the HR processes and seek further opportunities for improvement.
From this automation approach, we can see that applying automation in the business is endless. Business process automation software products are developing at an incredible pace. Many products come with pre-built automation routines based on best practices that can be tailored to any newcomer. These routines cover many business functions from HR, finance, sales, marketing, operations, maintenance, and supply chain. This is speeding up the uptake of automation software.
If you have not considered automating your processes, please visit our Resources page to find out more about workflow automation.
Interested in Automating Your Workflow?
We have a variety of resources to help you on your journey to an automated workflow.
Ready to Go Beyond Workflow Diagrams?
To see how quickly you can begin diagramming and then automating your processes, request a demonstration or trial of Integrify.
Additional Process Design Resources
- How to Write Process Documentation
- 5 Ways to Avoid Risk in Process Automation Projects
- What is Process Discovery?
- Workflow Metrics and KPIs Explained
- 5 Ways to Ensure Bad Workflow
