Analysing Processes: Dive into Swimlanes

Explore the power of swimlanes in driving process improvement and achieving efficiency.

For many organisations, mapping out processes and workflows allows you to see opportunities for process improvement and to manage performance. A specialised process management platform helps organisations map and analyse current processes. This is necessary to identify bottlenecks and risks, and ultimately, to achieve continuous improvement. Within this framework, swimlanes and value streams play a crucial role, providing in-depth insight into your processes and creating opportunities for optimisation. 

Swimlanes

For every property you have defined in Tables for a process step, Engage Process automatically generates a swimlane view in the Modeler and Viewer that allows you to show the process for all values used in the chosen property field. At the click of a button, you can visualise your processes by role, IT system involved, department, location, or more.

For example, through this view, you can quickly and easily see which responsibilities or process steps belong to which role. This provides clarity on which role is responsible for certain process steps, which IT systems are used (where and when), and many other visualisation options to help you create a relevant view of your process and generate actionable insights. 

Identify value-added steps and waste

In Engage Process, value-added swimlane views offer another perspective. This view is useful for visualising value creation and identifying improvement opportunities. It is not unusual for organisations to find that only 10 - 15% of their process steps add value - whether that is to the customer or the organisation. And more often than not, these steps represent only 1% of total production time. 

Typically, a step is defined as "adding value" if it meets three criteria:

1. The customer is willing to pay for it

2. The step must physically change the product or service in some way, or must be a crucial prerequisite for another step

3. The step must be done right the first time

Using the colours red, yellow and green, you can easily identify the value-added steps versus bottlenecks, prompting changes to modify or even eliminate a process step. The non-value adding process steps that can be eliminated are known as 'waste'. In some cases, other non-customer-value-added activities cannot be removed because of legislation, environmental, or health and safety reasons. These activities should still be reviewed to ensure they are performed as quickly and efficiently as possible. 

As noted, swimlanes and value streams provide a powerful way to visualise and analyse processes. To see it in action or to learn more about process management, request your trial below.