How to map a process, when there is neither an existing one or a procedure?

Hi Marieta,

The issue that you are facing is now with the lawers professionals only. In all industries, there is a hunger for a change but once it is about the people to start describing their processes they have always had similar issues like:

- having so many variations in the process so they can't describe them all or are being confused to say which is the basic process and which are the exceptions

- don't have time to spend in workshops, Kaizen meetings or even simple process description work and mapping

Thus the work of the Lean or process improvement specialists is highly loaded with shadowing, manual process mapping, and document writing and then validating. Often the time spent for the process understanding / description /mapping is equal or even longer than the improvement / automation that is as an outcome form the project.

So your question is really valid and that's so good that you are oriented towards optimizing that part of the process that is usually neglected 

Here is my suggestion for you.

After you have a clear idea of which process is in scope and which are the people executing it, you can use a tool that is doing an automatic process capturing. You would have several steps to perform but still, the total time for the process mapping will be months shorter than the manual / shadowing approach:

1. the tool is capturing :

- the user's actions on his/her machine (PC or laptop) in systems used in the process. This can include all like Outlook, MS Office applications, Web, workflow and Core systems

- together with the actions as steps, the tool can capture the data that's been inserted

- you can have recordings of as many as you want process variations

2. review the captured data in the system or in the preferred output format - generated process map, excel or video having the steps, processing time and data used / inserted

3. analyze the data and suggest changes, make the changes in the process in the tool

4. generate your new and final process map or any other document you need to visualize your process

You will find this much easier to see the process details, to unlock your process improvement ideas and activities.

This is very useful to be provided also to the vendors who would automate the process to speed up the requirement gathering phase. Especially effective to speed up the RPA development

Hope this helps and I stay in touch for more details

Milena