Flowchart Wikipedia Chart Different Symbols Used

By Vanessa Richter on December 08 2018 08:37:52

As a process mapping consultant, it is imperative to get everyone to see not only their own procedures, but how they interconnect into the organizational structure. Once in place and agreed upon by all the contributors, you begin to be able to challenge the current way of doing business and assist them in finding inefficiencies that could be costing the business thousands of dollars.

Well, flowcharts can be used to analyze, design, document or manage a process in a wide variety of fields. Examples could include a Recruitment or Accounting process, the logical procedure within a piece of software, or a process in an organization such as Health & Safety, Equal Opportunities, Conciliation & Arbitration or Social Services. There are several derivatives of the basic flowchart including the Workflow Diagram,

Helping an organization map out processes can be a challenging task unless you know how to create sample flowcharts. When attempting to get subject matter experts to redefine their business processes, it is imperative to help them identify gaps or redundancies in their current as-is process.

Once the team recognizes the problem areas, they can easily adjust the map to a future state version that can dramatically affect performance and turnaround time of the purchase order process.

A flowchart can enable the process analyst to effectively document the information given to them by the subject matter experts. With a defined list of symbols, directional arrows and flow diagrams, flowcharts can help the team find gaps and or problem areas that have been known for awhile but have never been visually mapped out in an as-is process map.

Each flowchart should ideally begin with a Terminator shape, from which the next step should be linked. Each shape should be indicative of a specific stage in the process and there are conventions for each of these, the most common being the rectangular "Process" shape. Many others exist, however, including shapes representing Data, Documents and Decisions. Decision shapes are diamonds, each of the four corners (or nodes) being either a link from the preceding shape or action to be taken in the next stage depending on the decision.