How to Document a Business Process
Businesses lose large sums of money each year as a result of simple operational inefficiencies. Many managers never take notice of a minor inefficiency until it's mushroomed into a major financial sinkhole. Most of these inefficiencies have a common root cause: lack of process.
A business process is the method that an employee follows to perform some work-related task. If a business process isn't taught by management or senior members of the organization, then employees invent their own processes to do their work. Most managers don't take the time to properly determine what the most efficient processes are. And even if they do know the best way to get things done, they often don't take the time to communicate these processes to those who need them most.
The problem that this lack of business analysis and communication causes isn't apparent in very small organizations until it results in a fiasco. And as more and more people join the organization, the potential for miscommunication, catastrophes, inconsistency and inefficiency increases exponentially. This conspicuous omission on the behalf of managers undeniably results in real dollar losses for their businesses over time.
Luckily the problem is easy to correct. Start by documenting all of your key business processes and any variations that have precipitated as a result of employees having to teach themselves how to do their jobs. How do to do this with SmartDraw is what we're going to show you in today's video lesson.
How to do it with SmartDraw
The video lesson uses a detailed example of a customer support process to explain how to approach process documentation. The basic steps are these:
Step 1
Sit down with your employees and have them articulate their work as a series of steps. Each of these steps will become a box in your flowchart.
Step 2
In SmartDraw, select "Blank Flowchart" from the SmartTemplates menu.
Step 3
Start adding boxes for steps a worker performs by clicking the "Add" buttons in the SmartPanel.
Step 4
For instances where a worker makes a choice between two possible next steps, use the "Split Path" commands to add two parallel boxes at once.
Once your process is well documented, the next step is to analyze and improve it. This will be covered in detail in the next lesson.
Watch the video for this lesson.