Boosting Efficiency and Value in Process Mapping Initiatives

Many companies still rely on PowerPoints, Excel sheets, or hastily assembled BPMN documents that gather dust in some corner of the Teams environments to map and lead their processes. These are challenging to create in the first place, and even more difficult to maintain.

However, the advent of new technologies for systematically mapping, documenting, and measuring against real-world performance data has revolutionised process mapping. We have helped companies embrace these innovations to increase their efficiency and drive business value.

Joona Soratie

Joona is an operational excellence professional with a proven track record of creating strategies and turning them into value-adding operational execution. With a strong background in process development and Lean Six Sigma, he advocates for a structured, measurable, and data-driven approach to process and organisational improvement projects.

Establish central coordination but divide the work effort

The best process knowledge lies within the businesses, most likely amongst the process owners and specialists. Yet, completely letting business define their process documentation methodologies can lead to multiple ways of mapping processes and, therefore, a lot of complexity for future end-to-end process development initiatives.

It is crucial to have a centrally coordinated process documentation platform that enables process owners to document their processes effectively amongst some commonly agreed standards. This type of platform with divided responsibilities enables faster time-to-value and an increased sense of ownership within businesses to their own process documentation.

The fundamental role of the central process documentation function is to:

• Develop the process mapping tool and methodology

• Enforce the process framework and guidelines

• Train, document, and support the users

Create a process framework and guidelines

Process mapping should happen at various levels, from high-level overviews to detailed, sustainable process documentation initiatives requiring top-down buy-in. It's advisable to establish clear ownership, frameworks, and guidelines.

The tried-and-true components of this framework include:

• Clearly defined process layers and ownership: Documentation should not be a standalone effort but relate to the business need to improve process organisation and value.

• Unified classification and naming conventions: Define protocols for naming processes, process steps, and key performance indicators (KPIs), ensuring consistency across all documentation.

• Mapping conventions: Specify the appropriate use of BPMN elements, documentation practices, and other mapping standards. Many companies overly complicate their process maps with diverse notations, which can render them unwieldy; simplicity is key.

The PMI process standard & APQC Process Classification Framework give a good starting point for many companies to begin defining process layers, naming conventions and ownerships. Process enterprise groups are most commonly owned by someone amongst the top management or leadership teams of organisations. End-to-end processes should have their own more operational owners.

This structured approach ensures that process documentation remains clear, consistent, and manageable, facilitating effective process management and improvement initiatives.

To kick things off in practice, start using the Process Development Canvas. It makes managing and communicating process improvement initiatives in your organisation more effective and fruitful. Filled with clear instructions supported by real-life examples, it is your new best friend.

Add intelligence with real-world process measurement data

To gain insights into process performance and conformance to the process design, connect real-world data to your process maps. For example, some process mining solutions have tight integrations with the process mapping solutions to offer real-world event comparisons to defined current BPMN processes.

Ways to elevate process documentation: 

• Define clear performance targets for each process and document them in your process documentation system. Combine process performance analytics directly with these documented targets.

• Add process mining events as measurement points to your BPMN models. This provides the basis for linking the analytics and modelling efforts.

• Compare the documented processes to the real-world variance data from process mining. Conformance Analysis shows how closely real-world processes adhere to your defined standards and identify areas for improvement.

• Link the processes to your organisational IT architecture and compare what events are available from process mining. This enables you to see how much of your business processes are digital and decide coordinated actions on how to measure and develop the non-digital parts of your process.

All this is enabled by the proper tooling

There is a clear trend in combining process mining efforts with process modelling, also shown by the acquisitions and mergers process mapping and mining companies are undertaking. Choosing the right tool for process documentation is critical. The tool should be user-friendly, scalable, and compatible with other systems used within the organisation. It should support various levels of process mapping and allow for easy updates and modifications.

These are the leading tools for process documentation and improvement in 2024.

Conclusion

Efficient process mapping requires a top-down initiative to structure processes and document them according to set standards on a common platform. When an effective process documentation platform is created and integrated with data-driven process mining tools, it enables a scalable documentation initiative that is easier to maintain and creates more value than static process documentation.