Process Modeling: A Tool for Process Improvement

What is process modeling?Process modeling is a creative tool that allows you to use data from your processes to guide and clarify your decisions on how to improve your processes. In practice, the role of a process modeler is to transform the history of data into a process model of your company. This model can be created by people (personally or subjectively) and built upon by machines (computer-based or manual). To best describe the role of a process modeler, imagine a carpenter. We’ve all seen his craftsmanship – it’s the nails in the wall and in the floor that hold together our lives.

So how does this help us apply process modeling to improve the management of our processes? What we are really doing is bringing all the data, all the problems, all the issues in our operations into one place.

What are the benefits of process modeling?Properly defining your business processes increases efficiency, lowers costs, improves the quality of your service to customers, and increases your profits. Your process modeling helps you to better understand and respond to your customers’ needs. By defining your process, you’ll be able to achieve better results and avoid missed opportunities. If your processes change, your new ones will be better planned and prepared.

How can you use process modeling to help your team?

By using process modeling you can increase the efficiency of your daily work as well as increase the quality of the output. Process modeling is also a great tool for training your team in order to increase your efficiency and boost your ability to achieve your objectives.

How to model your business processesThe primary goal of process modeling is to clarify how your business actually works, so that you can make better decisions about how to run your business. You don’t want to model processes that don’t need changing, but you do want to identify processes that you can improve.

As you go through the process of modeling a process, you should be focused on three key questions:

What is this process? What do we do with it? What is the desired outcome?

For this guide, I’ll be focusing on modeling a process for one of the most common topics in business: customer service. However, it should be fairly obvious how you could apply process modeling techniques to any business process you’re trying to improve.

How process modeling can help your business

The term process modeling really refers to the process of gathering information, classifying and analyzing this information, and then presenting this information in a format that allows a team of people who are working on a project to use this information to make improvements to the project.

From a software development perspective, process modeling can be used to generate software requirements that are capable of being developed and implemented effectively. Or, process modeling can be used to organize and analyze large data sets to help provide better insight to a team in terms of where to focus their work. BPM Consulting Process modeling can be used to validate that your tests are actually effective in dealing with the issues that your automated testing suite is designed to handle.

ConclusionIn the fast-paced world we live in, good business processes are more important than ever before. Good process modeling helps you to identify bottlenecks and hidden costs associated with your processes, leading to better results, shorter cycles, and more profits for your business.