5 Essentials for a successful Business Process Mapping

Original link: http://moveableonline.com/blog/2016/10/07/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 the management has adapted to the faulty system and feels no obligation to change it since it works anyway.

What is Business Process Mapping?

Business process mapping and re-engineering (BPR) involves laying out business processes, linking them to function together, 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 simply enables you to identify better and more efficient ways of working. Currently, BPR is closely linked to software applications and plays a significant part during 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 it’s 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 don’t have robust maps for all their processes or business operations. In some cases, maps are 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 finance department utilizes that data.

Carry out Analysis

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

• Inefficiencies like people doubling up 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 a software development.

Analyze any Gaps 

Upon process implementation, do a follow up to see if there is any gap left. No system is completely foolproof. Check any new issues that are brought by the new system and see how you can solve them.

Why Process Improvement?

The value of process mapping may not be visible to many people since everyone concentrates on micro-improvement within specific departmental domains as opposed to having an end-to-end understanding of the process. By contracting a third party service provider to have a bird’s eye view of your processes, you can identify issues that slowly kill your business.