5 Essentials for a Successful Business Process Mapping

Have you been coping with a disjointed system? When your system doesn’t serve its primary purpose, it makes your b2b marketing strategy inefficient. It’s even worse when management has adapted to the faulty system and feels no obligation to change it, as it works anyway.

What is Business Process Mapping?

Business process mapping and re-engineering (BPR) involves laying out business processes, linking them to functions, and identifying opportunities for improvement. Your approach is to look at the business as one holistic process that works to provide products or services.

Streamline your Processes

Business process mapping enables you to identify better and more efficient working methods. Currently, BPR is closely linked to software applications and plays a significant part in software development.

What are the Steps taken in Business Process Mapping?

Gather Adequate Information

The first step is to learn about the process you’re trying to re-engineer. Whether it’s your internal system, you’re re-mapping, or a new application you’ve bought from a third-party vendor, you need to equip yourself with a thorough knowledge of its operation and know what to change.

Map the Processes

The next step is to map these processes. Most organizations lack comprehensive maps for all their processes and business operations. Maps are sometimes segmented per department, even if the processes are interlinked. For instance, the marketing department may have clear maps for preparing purchase orders for suppliers, yet they don’t have any idea of how the finance department utilizes that data.

Carry out analysis

Now that you understand your system and you’ve drawn a map, the next stage is to analyze the system and identify the weak points, areas of concern, and strong points. The analysis aims to uncover structural problems, including:

• Inefficiencies like people doubling up on duties.
• Useless complexities that can be removed.
• Error-prone components of the process.
• Non-automated processes.

Process Re-engineering and Implementation

Finally, you can solve the problems identified and begin the implementation process. In most cases, the implementation involves software development.

Analyze any Gaps

After implementing the process, conduct a follow-up to identify any remaining gaps. No system is completely foolproof. Identify any new issues the new system introduces and determine how to resolve them.

Why Process Improvement?

The value of process mapping may not be visible to many people because everyone focuses on micro-improvements within specific departmental domains, rather than gaining an end-to-end understanding of the process. You can identify issues that slowly kill your business by contracting a third-party service provider to have a bird 's-eye view of your processes.