In today’s competitive markets, process mapping tools are increasingly emerging as a popular way for organizations to optimize their business processes. They allow businesses to identify innovative ways of optimizing their everyday practices by providing visibility and control.
Making processes visible, auditable, and easy to monitor provides real benefit for organizations of any size. Only when you can visualize the individual links that make up your different business processes can you begin to reduce bottlenecks and increase efficiency.
But despite the clear business benefits, convincing the C-suite to invest in a new tool or to even alter their internal processes can be difficult.
Senior management are often hesitant to evaluate and improve their processes, since they suspect it could cause more complications than it solves, and get the business caught up in unnecessary formalities and red tape. If you want to pitch your chosen process mapping tools to the C-suite and secure approval, there are a few things to keep in mind.
Here’s a look through what process mapping tools could mean for your business and how you can choose the right one to ensure that the decision-makers at your organization will be more than happy to invest.
But first…
What is process mapping?
Process mapping software is a powerful business tool that makes it easy to view your organization’s processes, step by step, so you can better understand them and enable continuous improvement, quality assurance, and risk management. This applies to everyday businesses processes like onboarding customers or new employees, vacation requests, invoice and other document generation and many, many other everyday processes across an organization.
Ensuring that everyday business processes run smoothly is a vital part of success. But to convince the C-Suite to buy-into new software, you need to make it clear its value. If you’ve chosen the right software, this is perfectly manageable.
Let’s look at several ways to help secure leadership buy-in for your process mapping solution.
Ease of setup
The more time-consuming and disruptive a setup process is, the less likely your line of business leaders are going to approve the process. If the software requires fundamentally changing the way that large areas of the company operate – you’re going to require a very good reason to convince them to implement it.
On the other hand, if it fits neatly within your existing IT systems and processes, then you’re likely to have much more success in securing leadership buy-in.
Your chosen tool should preferably be code-free so the IT team doesn’t waste valuable time learning how to use it, and it can be used by employees without coding skills.
Emphasize business benefits
If you want to convince business leaders of your tool’s importance, you need to make it clear about the value it will create across your business. Simply drawing attention to the features will only be so successful; you need to make it clear why this is important.
You could start by drawing attention to inefficient processes in your company. C-suite workers operate on a high level, meaning they rarely know the ins and outs of everything that goes on in the organization. If inefficiencies exist and improvements can be made, they may not be aware of them.
Once you’ve highlighted existing inefficiencies, you can present your process mapping tool as the clear solution to the problem. You should make it clear how it’ll make it easier to identify similar inefficiencies, as well as monitoring the improvements that the changes create over time.
The key to ensuring business leaders see the value in your suggestion is emphasizing how it helps the whole company. There’s no point simply explaining how it’ll make your job easier if it makes no difference to everyone else. It’s important to choose a tool that is simple for everyone to use and boosts collaboration at all stages of business processes.
Choosing the right process mapping tools
A key step to securing leadership buy-in for process mapping software is choosing the right tool. As a simple to use, collaborative, and value-enhancing process mapping platform, Nintex Promapp® is capable of transforming your business by optimizing your internal processes.
Nintex Promapp® is simple to deploy and run across your organization. Starting on a small scale, you can track and monitor your everyday business processes and identify where efficiencies can be made. It minimizes the disruption that often comes with new software, and provides real, tangible value to businesses, by documenting processes and allowing you to visualize everyone’s role within it.
To improve your internal business processes, you first need to understand them. For this, Nintex Promapp® is essential. If you want to find out more about how it can help revolutionize your business, try it for yourself today.
