A History of Process Mapping
by Brit Harvey, Vice President, PMC Solutions
Business process mapping embodies the belief that seeing is believing.
While we all have varying levels of familiarity with our organization’s
processes, it’s not until we see each step broken down and placed in a
visual guide that we understand exactly what each function is, and its
impact on the rest of the organization.
Process mapping has long been used to assess manufacturing processes by
helping the company and employees identify activities, bottlenecks, and
waste. The picture process maps create helps employees visualize and
quantify the amount of time spent on each activity during the entire
process.
Before business drawing software was introduced in the early 1990s,
process mapping was a mammoth production requiring days of meetings and
drafting by skilled artists to create iteration after iteration as the
map was defined and refined. Even after drawing software was introduced,
the task of transferring the information to a computer to create the
process map was painstaking. Process mapping still required employees
from several different departments to devote two or more days to meet
and use sticky notes and poster paper to accurately map processes.
Recreating the process map on the computer depended greatly on the
availability of the facilitator. Usually, several days passed before
anyone saw an actual process map.
inProcess by PMC Solutions uses a user-friendly, Web-based design to allow
users to create process maps in a matter of minutes, not days, and
instantly share that information with the entire organization. This
means fewer work hours are spent mapping and more hours are spent
tackling the real issue: improving processes and efficiency.
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