Why should we map a Business Process?

At Procentrica, we are passionate about process. It’s what we do on a daily basis and we strive to help you make the most out of the systems and technology you have already invested so much in, giving your CEO something to really smile about. Business Process Mapping is just one of our specialties and the benefits and rational for mapping business processes are discussed in more detail below.

Typical reasons for conducting process mapping include:

• To improve a process, you must understand the process
• Complexity of processes and lack of understanding constrains management’s attempts to improve processes
• Our Analytical skills and process mapping skills allow us to understand and communicate processes to management, staff and users
• Efficiency issues are identified and recommendations can be formulated
• If a business process is clearly mapped the door for re-engineering is opened and stakeholders are more willing to discuss optimisations to the process
• “Because that’s how we have always done it” becomes an unacceptable answer to the question of why things are done in a certain way. A clearly mapped business process will highlight that “because that’s how we have always done it” is not necessarily the best way of doing things

Advantages of Business Process Mapping

Having a complete and comprehensive mapped process of your business can be very valuable. It will empower managers in making decisions and allow staff to be more informed as to their roles and responsibilities. Some other advantages are listed below.

• Increases understanding of the business process
• Provides understanding of resource allocation
• Training become easier as processes are clearly defined and understood
• Increases staff awareness of roles and responsibilities
• Process maps are simple to understand
• Identifies dependencies between tasks
• Highlights the number of ‘hand-offs’ within a business process
• Finds ‘black holes’ and bottlenecks in a business process
• Enables metrics to be more easily defined as the process is clearly understood