The process map can be an invaluable tool in involving and empowering your personnel in your critical, customer-focused activities. With that, there are a wide range of positive benefits a focus on process mapping can provide.
What are the benefits of process mapping?
Business process mapping offers a number of benefits to organisations, including:
- Process maps represent the sequential sum of all activities needed to answer a request from a customer. Understanding the process map means that employees understand what is happening in the organisation.
- Provide a clear picture of operations from beginning to end.
- The ability to analyse and address potential bottlenecks in processes.
- Maps give insights to who is involved, doing what and where the handover moments are to the next role.
- They are the basis for change/transformation. When teams adjust the process map to the new required situation, it then becomes the blueprint for systems design, organisational set up, capacity planning.
- Process maps help team members from different skills and departments to get consensus on how they work now and in a TOBE situation.
- Process maps are a basis to find and understand all other information involved; documents, descriptions, input/output, systems and data are all linked to the right place in the process.
- Process maps are the new basis for eLearning. They help new employees to understand what needs to be done from request to delivery. After they understand, they only need limited task instruction.
- Process maps represent the current way of working (AS IS) and provide a platform for improvement for any Lean, Kaizen, TOC, etc effort.
- The value of any continuous improvement and digital transformation efforts can be understood more easily by using the process map.
- Process maps can be the bridge between brainstorm sessions for improvement and instructions at the workplace.
- Process maps can be used to investigate and reflect which activities are truly customer value added, which are internally value added and which are non-value added.
- Process maps can be used as the reflection point for Scrum sessions; they help teams to point their day-start or week-start sessions towards the core activities (processes).
- Process maps can be critical in providing insight to outsourcing partners prior to assigning an outsourcing contract.
- Process maps are critical for compliance and risk management, where they help compliance and risk aspects to be understood in the context of these activities.
Thus, the true value of mapping processes is that it allows your teams to understand and explore your company's activities from a customer point of view.
As you can see, by investing the necessary time and resources into the development of process maps across your operations, you can unlock a varied array of advantageous outcomes for your business.
When should we use process mapping?
Process mapping should take place in an organisation involved in any of the benefits listed above. That is possibly all organisations.
Maps are ideal to be created at the outset of any new development or improvement; however, you should not limit the scope of process mapping to new developments only - every process within your business could potentially benefit from being inspected, documented and optimised in this manner.
When should we use process mapping?
Find out more about business process mapping
Learn more about how to create a process map
Want to know more about how process management works in practice? Download our whitepaper 'Starting your Business Process Management from Scratch'.
You can also learn about the wide range of products we offer, which are tailored to enhance the ability of our partners to deliver clear benefits through a focus on business process management.
