As we saw in our previous post, defining a company’s processes and identifying the steps, responsibilities, and deadlines is no trivial task. However, it is far from impossible, and it is essential to ensuring that the company operates effectively and that operational tasks remain cost-effective rather than becoming a drain on resources. These processes can also affect the effectiveness of business administration, improving—or, in some cases, undermining—its efficiency and ability to support the business.
What Is a Flowchart?
A flowchart is a tool for representing a company’s processes graphically according to defined principles. The Workflow Management Coalition publishes standards for representing process models, which underpin the operation of software and systems that support process modeling and control. These standards provide general patterns and standardized symbols for key process elements and the relationships between them. This ensures that once a process has been modeled and represented graphically, everyone can understand it, often even across international boundaries. This helps avoid misunderstandings about the meaning of individual shapes and diagrams. For process support software, it is also important to work with a consistent graphical notation, as this can make a diagram created in one application interpretable by another. (In practice, there are very few examples of this, although it has long been possible in principle.)
What Are Process Models and Flowcharts Used For?
A flowchart helps keep the process being defined clear and easy to follow. In our previous post, we described processes in text, which can quickly become lengthy and difficult to navigate, especially for more complex processes. Nevertheless, these descriptions provide a solid foundation for subsequent process modeling. Creating graphical process models can therefore be seen as the next step after describing the processes. Different flowchart elements represent different types of events: tasks, decisions, and a range of other process elements each have their own symbols. We will discuss these later; for now, we will introduce only the symbols needed for this particular process. However, we want to emphasize that using standardized notation is one of the most important foundations of flowchart creation. The chart is read vertically, from top to bottom, following the sequence of tasks. Returning to the invoice approval example from our previous post, we can represent it graphically as follows to make it easier to understand:
- Mariann or Erzsébet emails the invoice requiring approval to Gábor.
From the approver’s perspective, the graphical representation, accompanied by a brief description, looks like this:
The process step is represented by a rectangle in the flowchart.
- Gábor checks whether the invoice was legitimately issued and whether the related goods or services were delivered satisfactorily. If the invoice was not legitimately issued, Gábor rejects it and informs the sender that he cannot accept it.
In other words, this is a review step followed by a yes/no decision in the process. The decision is represented by a diamond:
If the invoice was not legitimately issued, the process cannot proceed; instead, the invoice is returned to Finance. If the process can proceed:
- Gábor checks the amount on the invoice. If necessary, he retrieves the contract on which the invoice is based and verifies the total amount.
Once again, there is a decision: is the amount correct? Here too, the diagram shows exactly what happens if the amount is correct and what happens if it is not.
The complete process diagram looks like this:
Now let’s combine the two: annotations alongside the flowchart can indicate which process step each symbol or section represents, making the steps in our example clearly visible in the diagram:
As we can see, the flowchart shows the sequence of steps, the decision points and their outcomes, and where a given step may lead to different subsequent steps (in this example, payment is made either by the approver or by Finance). This method can also represent more complex processes whose written descriptions would be very long and difficult to follow. Just as importantly, it shows exactly where a process can be improved or simplified. This makes a significant contribution to process improvement: unnecessary steps and illogical tasks or events are easy to identify, while the visual representation helps determine how the process could become more efficient and precisely which changes are worth making. A wide range of tools—some paid, some free—is available for creating these graphical representations. Our next post will cover these tools, along with different process events and the modeling of more complex processes.
Summary
If structuring and mapping your organization’s processes seems too challenging, it is well worth seeking help from experienced professionals who can readily address not only process design but also the communication challenges surrounding those processes.
At Click On, we place great emphasis on consistently backing our software solution with decades of professional experience through ongoing customer support. Our goal is not simply to provide software, but to establish truly optimized business processes that significantly improve efficiency and reduce resource requirements.
