Methods
Process Mapping
Recording how work flows today, including workarounds and waiting time, so that automation and integration projects are designed around the process people follow.
Part of Digital Strategy & Discovery
Process Mapping records the current state of a business process: the steps, who performs them, what triggers each one, where work waits and where it goes wrong. It describes what happens day to day, which often differs from the procedure manual.
Where it fits
Before automation, integration or AI work. A current process carries years of exception handling that exists for reasons: a regulator asked for it, a customer complained, or an upstream system cannot supply a field. An automated version tends to drop or hide the exceptions nobody mapped.
A useful map also shows where queues form, which steps exist only to work around a system limitation, which handoffs lose information, and which decisions depend on one person's knowledge, which is often the biggest risk.
Its limits
A map records the process at one point in time and goes out of date as the process changes. It also stops at the current state, so designing the new process is a separate step.
How we use it
We map with the people who do the work and walk through recent cases, including the ones that went wrong. When we redesigned MEMO Clothing's wholesale ordering, the starting point was a process that ran through a LINE group.
Related
Business Process Management, System Integration & API Development, AI & Document Intelligence