Process Mapping: A Guide to Understanding How Your Business Runs

What is process mapping?

Process mapping is the process of taking every business process within your business and mapping them out. By mapping out processes, you can then see how your company works, where you are having issues and where you have opportunities to improve. This also helps to show where the money is going.

This can then help you understand where there are opportunities for cost savings, areas that are likely to be underperforming or places where you are not doing enough with your team. The bottom line, process mapping is all about using data to solve problems. It involves taking in all the information that you have and visualising it in a way that is easily understood by those who are not necessarily responsible for the business.

Why do you need to map your business process?

Business process mapping is used to improve efficiency in your business and to identify and fix areas where your business may not be as efficient as it could be.

When mapping out your business, the tasks that you do can show you your different and often-overlapping responsibilities in different areas of the business. Using the task as a starting point, you can see what tasks you can automate, reduce, merge or split to form new tasks. This is a good way to identify inefficiencies and put them to rest.

You can use process mapping to identify what’s working for you and where your business is going. This can help you to pinpoint weaknesses in your business and to create a plan to correct them.

How does process mapping help your business?

Process mapping can help you to identify processes that are no longer needed. It will also allow you to identify why they’re not working as you want them to. These processes can then be replaced with more efficient processes that fit better with the rest of your business.

When you’re asked what problem you solve, it’s good to have a clear answer. Without one, people will be asking you questions about processes that don’t have a clear answer. When people start talking about why processes are going badly, they’re already talking about things that you’re no longer doing. They’re talking about the ways in which your business processes do not align with the way the company wants to be run.

This can lead to loss of customers, lost revenue and losses of market share.

Tools for Process Mapping

You can use either of the two most popular tools for process mapping: Gantt and Process Street. Process Street is free, while Gantt costs somewhere in the region of $1,000.

Gantt (also known as Project Map) provides you with a visual representation of your processes and how they connect with each other. You can drag and drop individual lines to visualise what is happening within the process, and it is easy to add or remove tags.

It is designed to work on Microsoft Windows, but you can also create and download templates to use with other operating systems. It is designed to work with plain text, and it is also accessible in Google Drive.

Gantt shows an outline of your company which outlines all the important parts of your business (BPM Consulting).

Process Mapping Examples

The processes identified and marked up in this example all relate to areas where the various departments of your business overlap. These include, for example, marketing, customer service and administration.

As you can see, the different processes have all been laid out on a map. They can be as simple as providing a picture or a diagram of what they do. They can also be very detailed and in-depth. In the example below you can see each process is described in great detail with supporting information.

Take note that the map of processes in the example above has been organised by various blocks which are further broken down by department. In other words, the various departments are described using a column of different colours.

Conclusion

Every business needs a proper and thorough process map if it wants to stay competitive in the digital economy. A good process mapping effort will give you insights that you can use to become a more efficient business, develop a more intuitive company culture and finally lead to greater revenue.

Although this guide outlines processes that are common in the construction industry, there are no real rules and procedures. You can find the ones that best suit you and your business by experimenting. As long as the process maps can be used and modified to fit your needs, you should be able to create an efficient and successful system.