PROCESS MAPPING & REENGINEERING (FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS)

THE IMPORTANCE OF PROCESS MAPPING

Process mapping is one of the most critical components of choosing and implementing a major technology. It helps you build a picture of the architecture of your home. Just as you wouldn’t build upon your home by understanding the architecture, you should not build upon your organization without understanding your processes. This step will allow you to understand the requirements you need for any software or hardware. When considering replacing or implementing a system, you will need to know all of the current business processes covered by that system that will need to be replaced or reengineered. There requires an inventory of all business processes that will need to be addressed by this replacement.

Process Mapping and Reengineering

Process mapping begins with identifying all of the people in the organization who understand business processes and actually use them on a regular basis to do their jobs. These people will provide critical input and insight into how these business processes actually work. It is also important to prioritize the most important processes, so they can receive the highest scrutiny and attention. However, the deepest dive manageable on each process is ideal, because it helps to discover complexities, costs, and impacts not previously known.

So, the first step to process mapping is to inventory and prioritize them. This is followed by identifying process owners. Process owner interviews allow us to do the initial breakdown of the higher level business processes and the major sub-processes that compromise them so that we can fully flesh out the inventory of processes and adjust the process mapping plan to address these in a proper priority order.

Process owners are not necessarily managers; they instead are those who engage with a process on a day-to-day basis. We want to get a realistic view of the inputs and outputs of a process.

This leads to developing SIPOCs and process maps. SIPOC stands for “supplier, input, process, output, consumer.” SIPOC is a tool that summarizes the inputs and outputs of a process in table form. For process maps, we use a visual language known as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). This allows us to graphically capture business processes.

Waste walks help us to pinpoint inefficient, risky, costly, or redundant processes. This can help organizations make adjustments to processes to create greater efficiency and lower costs. This also helps business process owners to feel empowered to “own” their processes.

We examine all processes through the lens of HUMALOGY^®. Humalogy allows us to see if each process has the proper balance of technology versus human effort. This ensures that each process is as efficient and effective as it could be.

FPOV’s 8 Step Process Mapping and Reengineering Service

Our typical process mapping service is conducted in 8 steps:

1. SME & Interviewer Prep: We collect existing documentation and, in some cases, observe process owners in action
2. Capture SIPOC: We work with the organization to capture current processes and jointly fill out our SIPOC template
3. Draw “Happy Path” Swimlanes: Happy path swimlanes are processes where there are no errors. We visualize what a happy path would look like through a process and begin BPMN notation
4. Playback Current State: We review process flow and metrics. We identify missing steps and capture high level pain points
5. Wast Walk Current State: Going backwards, step-by-step, we identify different types of waste
6. Issues, Risks, and Opportunity Analysis: Meetings to review best practices and create an internal IT view
7. Department Leadership Review: We review key or reoccurring issues as well as long or short term opportunities. We quantify ROI opportunities and discuss change management
8. Executive Leadership Review: We aggregate ROI opportunity as well as key themes focusing on integrations across departments