5 ways an expert can help you get Process Mapping right

In today’s era of stiff competition, companies are vying to defend their market position and build a competitive advantage. Business leaders are on a constant look out for ways to improve profitability, drive efficiency, reduce turnaround time and improve customer experience, to stay ahead of the competition. In face of these requirements, many organisations are turning to Business Process Management (BPM). The trend shows no sign of slowing down—as per a report by Markets and Markets, the BPM market is expected to grow from $8.8 billion in 2020 to $14.4 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 10.5%.

Clearly, many companies have already or are planning to jump on the BPM bandwagon. However, will all these organisations achieve the desired output? For over a decade, we have seen many organisations struggling to get the full value from their BPM initiative, despite investing considerable time and money. The key cause: they often don’t have the resources and expertise to get the process mapping stage right. 

Accurate Process Mapping: The Cornerstone of Business Improvement 

Process mapping is at the heart of any BPM initiative. It serves as a strong foundation for a successful implementation of company-wide business improvement and transformation initiatives. Having an effective process map is a critical first step in bringing transparency  in processes and identifying and breaking down bottlenecks. Done right, it can prove to be the most valuable tool for you to base your business improvement journey. However, any inaccuracies lead to cascading errors and huge financial losses.  

Many organisations lack dedicated BPM experts, or a large restructure leaves stakeholders short-staffed to complete process mapping quickly and accurately. Given the lack of expertise, they struggle to establish an appropriate starting point for the initiative and to clearly capture the roles, tasks, documents, and systems. Time is also of essence. Oftentimes, organisations spend months in capturing the details and laying out the process map but by the time they reach the analysis stage, the processes have already changed or become obsolete. 

As an accurate process map is a must to deliver quantifiable business improvement results in your organisation, it is absolutely critical for you to get it right. Hence, it is recommended to involve an expert at this stage to set the ball rolling for you. 

Here are the key areas where using the skills of a BPM expert can prove extremely instrumental in helping you realize the value proposition of BPM: 

1. Recommending processes that require attention: Organisations, especially big ones, have a number of processes. How do you know which processes require urgent attention? An industry expert can help you identify which business processes have a direct association with the organisations’ bottom line and give the ability to prioritise them. Taking into account your corporate goals or pre-set objectives (such as cost reduction, efficiency improvement, improved customer service, etc.,) the expert can recommend the processes that require attention. This will help you target your improvement efforts in the right direction.
2. Accurately capture task attributes: Many organisations simply create a regular flowchart to showcase a business process model. However, for the mapping to be accurate, key attributes, such as roles, documents, procedures, tasks, and applications need to be captured for overall analysis and improvement of the process. With accurate recording of process attributes, such as business rules, Key Performance Indicators, compliance details, RACI matrix, delay and execution time against the process, experts can help you get in-depth understanding over the current state processes and identify improvement opportunities.  Also, for a business process map to be effective, processes need to be broken into manageable chunk of information. An expert can come in extremely handy by ensuring the process map consists of a limited number of logical, manageable and comprehensible tasks, making it to-the-point and easy-to-understand for the process analysts and process doers.
3. Comprehensive process interviews: The importance of stakeholders’ interviews cannot be stressed enough. As they are involved in day-to-day activities, they can help you with unique insights into process pain-points, delays, etc. However, to ensure that all the relevant information is collected, a comprehensive interview with a pre-defined questionnaire needs to be conducted. A BPM expert has extensive experience of working across various projects and deducing appropriate information from business representatives. This makes the interview shorter—all the required information is gathered within the slot, avoiding repetitive sessions with the representative. This not only means minimum disruption to the productivity of the business representatives but also ensures their trust and cooperation throughout the improvement journey.
4. Consistent and accurate Process Maps: Uniformity is key when creating process maps. Clear, easy-to-read process maps are important so that anybody in the team right from non-specialist workforce to business analysts can understand and implement them. Hence, it is imperative to ensure consistency in information collection and the process map language. BPM experts use the worldwide-recognised standard for process modelling, such as BPMN, to create detailed and consistent process maps. With standardised process maps, analysing and modifying how the business currently operates becomes easier. One can clearly assess gaps in the current processes, communicate them with team members and identify how business processes can be improved.
5. Quick turnaround time: Creating a process map is an extensive exercise. There is work to be done at many levels— right from setting out process boundaries by defining process start and finish, creating the flowchart of work activity and people involved, to identifying process stakeholders for interview. Organisational teams, due to limited number of resources, often move from one level to another. This leads to time delays and the mapping exercise can go on up to months. By this time, processes have either changed or become obsolete. In such cases, the entire exercise becomes futile, while resulting in loss of team effort, time and costs. Tapping into the experience of BPM experts can help you significantly shorten the turnaround time as they have the resources to work Parallelly to accomplish different tasks. An expert in the team can start with the interview process, while another expert continues to work on the flow chart. With the combined effort of the team and their collective expertise, you can reach the analysis stage faster.

 Selecting the Right BPM Expert

Certainly, an expert can help you create accurate process maps, which will quickly facilitate end-to-end improvements, efficiencies, and compliance by identifying process bottlenecks and underutilized resources. That said, it is absolutely vital that you conduct due diligence. The expert needs to be a credible name in the BPM industry, with rich experience of working with several organizations and leading their business improvement projects. 

One service, which fulfils all the key areas discussed above is Fixed Cost Process Mapping Service by PRIME BPM. The service has been especially designed to give organisations a guarantee of accurate process mapping delivered in a timely manner. The structured service ensures end-to-end process mapping right from creating and validating process maps, gaining process approvals from process doers to finalising process documentation.

You stand to gain from a team of BPM experts, who possess years of experience in mapping activities and conducting process interviews. Also, there is a team of business process modellers, who are experienced at using mapping templates, standards, rules and guidelines to produce consistent outcomes.

Further, organisations can gain from these expert resources without any recruitment or administrative cost while avoiding the hassle of resource management. The service gives you a no risk approach–as it comes with a promise of no delivery, no payment. Moreover, the service is cost-effective and guarantees better output and lower cost than hiring a full-time individual or contractors as you need to pay only for the number of processes mapped. 

With these range of benefits, PRIME BPM can be your perfect partner in helping you achieve your business improvement objectives.