Process mapping techniques are a well-established method for boosting efficiency and productivity. However, taking the time to map out all of your processes can feel overwhelming—especially at a midmarket organization or enterprise.
That’s okay: it’s possible to start small with business process mapping and still realize its benefits across use cases. Let’s explore seven of the best ways to implement process mapping, complete with examples that show how much time and money process mapping can save your business.
What is business process mapping?
Business process mapping is a technique for visualizing and documenting your company’s workflows. People with deep knowledge of the process meet to describe each step or task and map them out in a diagram.
Many different business process mapping techniques exist—from simple hand-drawn flow charts to highly sophisticated process mapping software implementation. The technique you choose ultimately depends on the size of your business and the complexity of the processes you need to map out.
Some processes you might map include:
- Contract management
- Customer onboarding
- Customer compliance
- Leave requests
- Help desk support
- Invoice management
Why is process mapping important for your business?
Process maps give you visibility into how work gets done at your company and insights into what you can improve. When you use maps to find and fix issues, you see results like better efficiency, increased production, and higher-quality product roll-outs.
Your process maps also become a single source of truth that can improve collaboration, ensuring that everyone on a team understands and describes a process using the same terminology. This results in clearer communication—and less time wasted in meetings and discussions.
Finally, mapping your processes means you centralize and standardize them, making audits a breeze and helping you stay compliant with industry-specific regulations.
“Any compliance regulations or law changes impact your organization’s operations,” says Thomas Kohlenbach, Senior Product Specialist at Nintex. “Process mapping keeps you agile in the fast-moving world.”
Seven ways to realize the benefits of process mapping
Conducting a full process mapping project is a major undertaking. Nevertheless, it can deliver serious benefits beyond ‘just’ cutting costs and saving time.
Here are seven ways your business can best see the benefits of process mapping:
1. Create a personalized experience
Customer journey maps help you visualize the end-to-end customer experience across touchpoints. This allows you to identify pain points and friction, which are opportunities for optimization. With these insights, you can create personalized experiences for each of your customer personas—while standardizing these procedures within your company.
Digital customer journey mapping example: An insurance company sells a variety of insurance types. One customer has recently signed up for your newsletter, and they have previously only bought travel insurance. You might segment your email newsletter so this customer profile mainly receives offers about travel insurance deals—and not potentially irrelevant offers about car or life insurance.
2. Standardize processes
A process or customer journey mapping tool allows you to visualize all the individual steps in your company’s operations. Anyone can review the process map to learn what step they should complete next. That eliminates confusion and discrepancies and encourages workers to adopt best-practice methodologies.
Process standardization example: A new employee in your customer service department has just received an unusual customer request. They can refer to the process map to determine what to do next.
Standardization leads to improved manufacturing efficiency
Underwater technology manufacturer Sonardyne needed to standardize processes as they scaled to comply with their industry’s strict rules and regulations. The company turned to Nintex Process Manager, which became their central hub for process mapping. The tool helped them create shared best practices and common processes to help improve ISO compliance across locations. It also allowed them to embed training videos into their process maps to reduce training time and complexity and gave their sales team an improved, standardized approach to their quoting procedures.
3. Analyze and optimize workflows
With processes mapped out, you can analyze and pinpoint problems that previously went unnoticed. You can then develop a plan for continuous improvement and cut out any steps that have become obsolete or are unnecessary.
Workflow optimization example: After a process mapping session, your finance team realizes that supplier invoice payments require three approvals. They decide to eliminate two of those approvals and get invoices paid faster.
4. Identify opportunities for automation
When you can see a process, it’s easier to identify repetitive, time-consuming tasks, common bottlenecks, and redundancies. These tasks, steps, and stages are often prime candidates for process automation.
Automation opportunity identification example: Each time a customer makes a new purchase on your website, your ecommerce team must copy and paste the order from your website backend into a different inventory system. By being aware of this unnecessary manual step, it’s much easier to automate it.
5. Onboard employees
Perhaps the most time-consuming part of joining a new company is learning how processes work—who to go to for help, which departments are responsible for what, and what the chain of command is. Process mapping provides accessible visual information on where each department slots in and who oversees different processes—shortening the learning curve.
Onboarding process mapping example: A new remote worker at your business is unsure who to ask about getting approval for a new expense she’s recorded. Fortunately, she can check your process map and see who she’s meant to send the request to.
Professional services company doubles their profitability
Switzerland-based organization IOZ, which helps companies adopt SharePoint for their quality management systems, turned to Nintex for a top-to-bottom process review. The company discovered they could cut 58% of their processes and reassign employee responsibilities in a more efficient way. They also found they could use process mapping to improve employee onboarding in HR and marketing, which means newly hired employees are more effective more quickly due to clear expectations and processes.
Clarity around their processes also created more consistent client outcomes and an improved customer experience. “We now have 360-degree views into our client projects and we consistently achieve the same high quality because we’re all doing the work the same way,” says Samuel Alessandri, CEO at IOZ.
All around, the results have been dramatic—IOZ saw a 100% increase in profitability and continued growth.
6. Strengthen customer-facing roles
When sales, customer success, and support have clearly defined process maps to follow, they spend less time thinking about processes. Instead, they can focus on delivering exceptional service with confidence, knowing that they are following the correct protocols.
Customer support example: If you have mapped out a clear marketing funnel, all your customer-facing teams know what to do and when. For instance, say a customer has requested more information about your products. The sales team will know which brochures, ebooks, or technical documents to send—and where they’re stored.
7. Scale up with ease
Mapping reveals how much equipment, labor, or other resources a process consumes. Once you know, you can often use automation to reduce the resource load, allowing you to scale sustainably.
Process scaling example: A company needs to hire thousands of new employees for seasonal work. Usually, this would require lots of manual effort—posting ads online, reviewing applications, onboarding the staff, and so on—and doing this would require more human resources staff. However, if you could automate many of these processes, you could do more work without employing additional HR professionals.
Map your processes to improve your operations
Reviewing and mapping your current workflows (and then optimizing them) helps you discover more efficient ways to work and deliver value to your customers more quickly.
Nintex Process Manager lets you map simple and complex processes alike. With its drag-and-drop interface, it’s easy for your team members to use and for process executors to understand exactly what they need to do next.
Check out this data sheet to learn how Nintex can help map and manage your processes to save you time and money.
