Understanding Business Process Mapping

Businesses today understand that to remain competitive means to continually reduce costs. However, reducing costs often comes at a price and this sometimes means a reduction in the company’s service capabilities. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. When companies need to reduce costs, while protecting their service levels, they often turn to business process mapping strategies that isolate redundancy in the company’s work tasks.

Business process mapping is one of those few business concepts that is easily understood and easily adopted. It immediately isolates those business operations that add time, increase costs and create unnecessary work. It is a proactive approach to streamlining the company’s operations so as to ensure the company has clearly identified and eliminated those time consuming work procedures. Therefore, what are the essential approaches to benefiting from this simple and extremely effective way of eliminating needless work tasks?

Companies that look to improve their operations typically do so by mapping out their processes in a working document. To be successful means to map out the company’s business processes using various color coded lines and shapes. These colors and shapes designate work tasks, roles and responsibilities, internal departments and most importantly, the flow of work from one department to the next. It’s ideal that one color represent how work flows and another color for decision making situations. The purpose is to isolate those flaws in the company’s internal processes.

Identifying these flaws must coincide with pinpointing those redundant work tasks that add time and increase costs. In most cases, these work tasks pertain to unnecessary approvals and signoffs. Companies must therefore be willing to do away with these needless approvals and empower their employees and managers to take decisive action on business operations. However, the only way to do that is to first map out the company’s operations, identify its bottlenecks, apply an estimated time to these bottlenecks and then proactively eliminate these bottlenecks altogether.

Companies use business process mapping because it is a simple and extremely effective tool to identify and isolate delays in the company’s operations. It speaks directly to the time needed to complete work tasks and helps to pinpoint those redundant processes that add time and increase costs. When companies need to reduce costs, without negatively impacting their service capabilities, they rely upon the straightforward and simple strategies of mapping out their business processes. In fact, if done correctly, the company will not only reduce costs, but improve its overall service performance.