Application To Create Flow Chart

By Vanessa Richter on October 09 2018 19:58:52

Many departments have established business rules based on guiding principles and philosophies that may have been created years before. Because there has been no initiative in documenting these procedures, chances are that there are many rules still in place that are causing unnecessary barriers and redundancies that add to the purchase order cycle time.A flowchart is a sequence of graphical symbols and shapes that can be used to help subject matter experts visually walk through their processes and validate those rules for accuracy and relevancy based on current business needs.

In terms of the Information Systems industry, flowcharts have been used for years, well before the introduction of the commercial computer in business. Originally they included process diagrams; later they were used by programmers as a convenient means to document program logic. Such flowcharts typically made use of ANSI standard flowcharting symbols. But as the Structured Programming movement flourished in the late 1970`s, ANSI symbols were considered archaic, and many new types of diagramming techniques emerged, including Bubble Diagrams, Data Structure Diagrams, E/R Diagrams, HIPO, VTOC, etc. (anybody remember Nassi-Schneiderman Charts?). I could argue the pros and cons of the various techniques but that is not the point. What is important is that all of these diagramming techniques acknowledged documentation as an inherent part of the design process.

If your organization is looking for ways to reduce costs, the purchase order chain is one area that can be made more efficient. If the purchasing department learns how to draw a flowchart depicting the as is for each department, the overall effort could help reduce costs by eliminating redundant approval processes and mistakes.

A flowchart could be defined as a pictorial representation of a process in which the steps are symbolized by shapes - in other words a diagram that explains the steps in a procedure. Each shape should link to its neighbour by a connector line, and often these have arrow heads to describe the direction of flow.

Although drawings typically consist of geometric shapes, it is not uncommon to include tables or indices to represent decisions or to provide a cross-reference. Nonetheless, boxes and lines represent the principal means to visualize and communicate a design regardless of the structure to be built, and have been used since time immemorial.

Such drawings basically consist of boxes and arrows. Boxes (be it squares, rectangles, polygons, circles, etc.) represent tangible objects and lines represent relationships between such objects. Flowcharts are similar; here, boxes represent specific types of processes or decisions or objects such as inputs/outputs/files, and lines represent dependencies between them (comes from/goes to).