What is Process Mapping?
Definition and Fundamentals
Process mining, process mapping, process modeling… What makes them different from each other, and how do they fit together?
They all help businesses get a diagrammatic or visual representation of their processes. How they each go about that, and how effectively they achieve it, is what marks them out. Process mining, which is used by the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform, has significant advantages over basic process mapping approaches.
Process mapping might sound self-explanatory, but its meaning can get lost within the many terms and methodologies - many of them sounding similar - of business process improvement.
What is process mapping?
If you've ever made a flowchart of a process in your business, you've done a bit of process mapping.
You might also have heard of it as workflow mapping, workflow process mapping, or value stream mapping (VSM) which is a particular kind of process mapping - and something we explore in more detail in this article.
Flowcharts are the typical format a process map takes, sometimes it's even as simple as a straight line. This type of process mapping can be useful for system migrations or implementations, breaking down each process step in chronological order.
To find out what those process steps are, process mapping uses workshops, surveys, interviews, time studies and KPI reporting with the relevant areas of the business. Rather than conducting this internal research and cracking open the sticky notes to plot it all out themselves, businesses will sometimes enlist consultants to do the process mapping for them.
How are process mapping and process mining different?
Process mapping and process mining might both be designed to create a picture of what’s going on across your business, but they couldn’t be more different.
Business process mapping is lengthy and time consuming, requiring input from various stakeholders across the organization. Because that input is typically sought simultaneously through cross-department workshops, finger-pointing can break out where teams become defensive about their responsibility for the way a given process runs.
And at the end of it all, you get a subjective, static snapshot. Every time you want to bring it back up to date - which ideally would be at regular intervals - you have to go through this all over again, incurring the same costs.
Process mining makes life easier. It gives you an objective, continuously improving overview of your business processes. That's because it uses data from your source systems, rather than subjective views and bias, to automatically reconstruct your processes. It's more accurate since it's not reliant on teams' impressions of how processes operate and interrelate, and isn’t vulnerable to oversights, process blindspots, and misconceptions. You can therefore have more confidence in any insights and improvement actions you draw from process mining. This allows you to better field competing requests from your stakeholders.
And its use of real-time data brings another benefit as it enables a living, breathing view of your processes that’s generated immediately and always up-to-date. It gives you process visibility, transparency, and understanding over time, rather than at a single point. That means you can keep quantifying the impact of process improvements on your core KPIs.
What are the benefits of process mapping?
Although eclipsed by its more powerful descendant, process mining, process mapping can be a starting point for businesses coming into process improvement fresh, without prior insight into their business operations.
Businesses can use process mapping to uncover bottlenecks, non-compliance, and missing documentation. And it can seem a less intensive, demanding way of gaining process visibility and standardization than investing in a process mining solution. However, this can prove a false economy - as our process mapping vs process mining section explains above.
Businesses can also find process mapping methods such as workshops valuable for bringing together different stakeholders, as they feel these help to get buy-in for a change or improvement initiative. They can also help promote a culture of knowledge-sharing and collaboration across teams and departments, who might have so far worked in silos and with misconceptions about what all the other teams do.
Types of process maps
Flowcharts are the bread and butter of process maps. For simple processes, they can be straightforward to create and interpret, but that also comes at the cost of capturing detailed information such as resource requirements. There’s a variety of process mapping techniques available to suit different needs, including:
High-level process map or SIPOC diagram: A structured format that shows big-picture workflow connections within a process. These maps categorize actions and requirements into suppliers, inputs, process, outputs, and customers, making it easier to pinpoint the most relevant information and impacts across functions.
Swimlane diagram or cross-functional diagram: Shows activities by role or function, giving a picture of dependencies and interactions across an organization.
Value stream map: Commonly used to show the process by which a product or service makes its way to a customer, usually with a timeline to indicate the duration of each stage so areas for operational improvement are obvious. Hailing from lean management, a value stream map is designed to analyze activities and process steps that are wasteful.
Detailed process map: Particularly useful for zooming in on the granular steps and requirements of an activity within a larger process, such as invoicing a supplier as part of the supply chain management process.
Take a closer look at types and examples of process mapping methods
Process mapping symbols
To ensure a business process map can be consistently created and interpreted, it uses a set of symbols that are standardized for each type. These include the flowchart shapes you’re probably familiar with – from the international standard, Unified Modeling Language (UML) - but there are many more out there for more intricate process maps. We’ll just cover the staples and what they designate here.
Oval: The start or end of a process, known as a terminator.
Arrow: The flow from one process step, decision, or activity to the next.
Rectangle: A step of the process.
Diamond: A decision in the process, which will then have the possible outcomes branching off it with arrows.
Rectangle with a wavy bottom edge: Resembling a scrap of paper or a note torn at the bottom, these represent a document or piece of information, such as a memo or order.
Parallelogram: Input or output of data, such as sending an email confirmation.
D-shaped rectangle with a curved right edge: A delay or period of waiting in the process, such as processing data.
How to create a process map
Now that we’ve covered some of the different process mapping techniques and components, here’s a compact guide to creating one for your business.
First, you need to do the prep so you have the right information to inform your process map. That means speaking to the right people, which depends on the process and who it affects or is involved, as well as if it’s specific to a particular area such as supply chain, or spans multiple business functions. You can extract the information in a group workshop or by interviewing individuals.
When people are well-accustomed to a process they repeat regularly, they can easily skim over or overlook details that are less obvious to the uninitiated. But these all need capturing if your process map is to be comprehensive. So you’ll likely find you need to be prescriptive and draw out any detail or smaller steps involved.
Once you’ve gathered all the information, you can then start drawing out the business process map itself. Organize the steps and detail chronologically, choose the most appropriate map type from the list above, and make sure you have the process map symbols to refer to.
To test whether your process map works, ask someone outside of the project if they can follow it. Any areas that are unclear might need revisiting, drawing out additional steps or even creating a detailed process map.
If you are left with processes or steps that seem duplicated, or sequences that seem overly complicated and inefficient, but they're consistent with the research you undertook, you’ve identified some areas for improvement - a great win from your process mapping exercise.
Get more tips and advice in our blog on how to create process map from scratch
How to select a process mapping tool
Creating a process map doesn’t have to be a manual task. There are many process mapping tools that will provide you with a template or even plot out a map for you from the data you enter. And it’s not just the cost that you should consider when deciding which to use.
Here are some features to look for when choosing process mapping software:
Variety of process maps: Some tools will be more specialist and or restricted just to flowcharts, for example, so will be less beneficial if you need to do things like assign steps and activities to different business functions.
User-friendliness: If you’re trying to simplify or clarify a process, the last thing you want is a process mapping tool that’s hellishly complicated, so check it’s not too technical. Ready-made templates can help with ease of use, and save considerable time.
Support for integrations: Another time-saving feature is whether the process mapping tool can integrate with your other systems and solutions, allowing you to import or export data and automations.
Ability to collaborate: If you're working on your process map with different stakeholders, you'll need a tool that’s collaborative so you’re not slowed down by having to send files and versions back and forth.
Read our list of questions to ask when choosing a business process mapping tool
How to make process mapping easier with Celonis
It can be daunting to undertake a process visibility project, so it helps to partner with a provider that has lots of skin in the game. At Celonis, we bring best practices and experience from a decade of process improvement initiatives and implementations.
This enables us to deliver fast time to value and maximize your return on investment. The Celonis platform can not only efficiently create an accurate map of your current process, but also leverage artificial intelligence to recommend improvements.
Instead of traditional, manual process mapping, Celonis uses industry-leading process mining technology to extract and connect all of your business data in your very own Process Intelligence Graph (PI Graph). The PI Graph builds a system-agnostic digital twin of a business and couples it with the unique business context within which the organization operates (KPI definitions, improvement opportunities, what makes something "good" or "bad" for the organization). Then, we layer in AI to help you see how your processes are interconnected, how your business runs, and how it can run even better.
Ready to drive value from automated business process mapping?
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