Business Process Map

What's the Difference between Business Process Mapping and Modeling?

Sometimes business process mapping and business process modeling are used interchangeably to refer to simply documenting of how a business operates, how inputs and outputs flow through a system. In reality, business process mapping is the tool focused on documentation. It shows how work is done, not necessarily how it should be done. Business process modeling is more about in-depth analysis and optimizing inefficiencies and bottlenecks.

How to Make a Business Process Map

1. Identify the process you want to document
2. Gather information from process participants via interviews or observations
3. Identify the start and end points of your process
4. Break the process into distinct tasks and decision points

If you want to perform a detailed analysis, you may want to continue by creating a business process model.

SmartDraw will let you make a simple business process map or model using a template and built-in symbols.

Activities

Activities are tasks that must be executed during the process. They can be performed by an individual or the system. An activity is depicted with a rectangle with rounded corners. Activities can have sub-processes, loops, multiple instances, and compensations.

A sub-process is a set of activities that can show a task in more detail. For example, the activity "deploy web page" may include the sub-tasks of checking it into a source control, merging code to the production servers, and copying from production to the live servers. A collapsed sub-process is depicted with a small plus sign on the activity symbol and the sub-process is visualized in a separate diagram.

A loop repeats until one or more conditions are met.

An activity with multiple instances means all sub-tasks must be completed before proceeding to the next task. These instances can be executed in sequence or in parallel. For example, you might model a process during which 3 stakeholders have to approve an outline before a video can move into production. Those three approvals would be an activity with multiple instances.

A compensation event appears in the process in response to something that needs undoing such as a cancellation or denied authorization.

A transaction activity is a special type of process used for payment.

A call activity is a reusable sub-process throughout the entire system.

Gateways

Gateways depict a decision step, a point of convergence or divergence of flow in the process. They can be exclusive or inclusive, parallel, complex, or based on events or data.

An X inside a gateway symbol indicates a decision between mutually exclusive choices. In programming terms, this is an "or" event. The flow will travel down only one path.

A parallel gateway, indicated with a plus sign inside a diamond, requires that the process continues to flow in both directions from the decision point. We basically want to have our cake and eat it too. This is an "and" event.

An inclusive gateway allows the flow to travel down more than one outgoing path.

Event based gateways are triggered by events rather than conditions, for example a message, elapsed time, a signal, and so on.

Flows

Flows connect the activities that are part of a business process. These connections are meant to indicate relationships.

A sequence flow is the most frequently used flow type shown as a straight line with an arrow. This type of flow indicates the sequence in which tasks are executed.

A message flow depicts the flow of messages from one participant to another. It is shown with a dashed line with a circle on one end and an arrow at the other. Make sure messages don't connect activities or events in the same pool. Never attach a gateway symbol to a message flow.

An association, represented with a dotted line (sans arrow), is used to show a relationship between an artifact like data and tasks on your diagram.

Artifacts

Artifacts are not part of the process, but may be relevant to it. These are usually annotations or data.

Business Process Management Life Cycle

The purpose of mapping and modeling any business is to improve and optimize. This often can't be done in a single step, but rather follows a cycle of observations, modeling, implementing changes, and monitoring.

The steps in a BPM life cycle are: model, implement, execute, monitor, and optimize.