Can I Offer You Some Feedback? - Episode #117
Show Notes:
In this week’s Business Bite, Sara covers the strategy of process mapping and how visualizing your business’ steps through diagrams and flow charts can help you spot inefficiencies and streamline processes! Learn the historical context and get concrete examples of how process mapping is used to improve everything from customer onboarding to manufacturing. Subscribe for new weekly episodes!
Below we are offering a transcript of the podcast for accessibility and reference.
Episode #117: Business Bites: Process Mapping
Welcome to Business Bites. My name is Sara. This is the podcast for busy professionals who want the quick hits of business terminology, historical context, and strategies for integration. Today, we're exploring process mapping, a technique for visualizing and improving business processes. Process mapping is the visual representation of the steps involved in a business process using diagrams or flow charts to illustrate how tasks, inputs, and outputs interact with the process. When we're thinking about process mapping, it is kind of like drawing a step-by-step picture of how things get done. It helps you see the stages of a process and how everything fits together, which makes it easier to spot areas for improvement.
Process mapping has its roots in industrial engineering and management practices from the early 20th century. It gained prominence with the rise of quality management and continuous improvement methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma. Let's talk a little bit about some examples for process mapping. First, let's say you're looking to improve customer onboarding, bringing them into your organization and getting them familiar with your terminology. Let's think about building the process map to outline the customer onboarding steps from initial contact to full integration. So perhaps you think about first, we reach out to our customer, we send them material about our business, then we move them through this step, the next step, the next step. And as you go through this, you may identify that your average new customer goes through 30 steps as they are becoming onboarded into your process.
Once you have this written down, it helps identify inefficiencies and areas where the process can be streamlined for a better customer experience. Let's talk about a second example. Let's say you're trying to streamline a manufacturing workflow. You might develop a process map of the current manufacturing workflow to visualize each stage in the production. This allows for the identification of bottlenecks in the process and opportunities to improve efficiency and in the long-term reduce waste.
I've got two tips for you in thinking about how you might get started with process mapping. First, it's important to involve key stakeholders. Who are the team members that you need to engage who are directly involved in the process to ensure accurate and comprehensive mapping? Their insights are crucial for capturing the full scope of the process. This is the kind of thing that you can tell when individuals who have not actually done the work have created the workflows, it always breaks down an actual execution when you do take it to the frontline. This is where it's important to involve people who actually do the work in understanding all of the specific steps that may come into it.
The second tip I have for you is using standard symbols. When we're thinking about standard symbols, again, remember, this is a visual representation of the steps involved in a business process. So standard symbols might include squares for steps that include this, or triangles for steps that include a specific technology, or circles or colors for certain notation in your process map to ensure clarity and consistency. There are preset shapes and symbols in certain process mapping softwares, but you can use anything you'd like within your organization as long as you have consistency. This makes it easier to understand and to communicate the process with others.
This has been Sara with Business Bites. You can reach me at podcast@mod.network. We would love to hear from you on what other terminology you'd like bite-sized. As always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend. We'll see you next time.