Process design is integral for efficient business. These intricate models are the blueprints that draft the well-thought-out structure of a company. For employees, excellent process modeling can optimize their work and find new, better ways to complete their tasks. Exceptional process design can cut operations costs, promote productivity, and maintain consistency throughout important procedures like HR management or product manufacturing.
Despite the value that process design has to offer companies, many businesses start building with no blueprints at all. They act intuitively without ever doing any planning and construct the frameworks of their company without following any official design. Instead, many make halfhearted plans with primitive tools – sometimes using merely pen and paper – and miss out on the features that could accelerate their process design. This is detrimental to the potential that proper planning has to offer; designing even small-scale projects can promote better allocation of resources and optimized workflows.
That being said, let’s talk about what takes process modeling from archaic to exceptional, and four main features any great process design software should provide to enhance your entire planning process.
Process Documentation
If the software or tools you are using don’t have documentation capabilities, you are likely spending more time and headache documenting your process modeling than you need to. Process documentation allows users to add, save and change any information on your design or a specific aspect of it, and export this information as a PDF file. This fast and simple method of saving important information makes documentation easy, and helps you keep track of the project design throughout its creation and execution. Without sufficient process documentation, information can be easily lost, and it becomes harder to maintain consistent communication between those involved in the project model. In addition to documentation, a process library should be available to you to save all of your processes and the information within them, storing them in one place for easy retrieval.
Visual tools
Designing and editing a process flow should not be rocket science – useful process design software is easy to learn how to use, and should not involve extensive coding. A comprehensive, visual interface with drag-n-drop support allows both IT professionals and everyone else on your team to understand how to use the software so everyone can get involved. A user-friendly visual interface promotes productivity and accelerates your process design since it can be learned at a fast pace and employees can start designing right away.
Process Modeling with BPMN 2.0
Every great process design software should feature BPMN 2.0. BPMN is a notation used in process modeling that helps visualize process flows and describe business processes. It gives users the benefit of a standardized language, helping IT professionals and citizen developers alike understand process models and their components easily. Essentially, BPMN allows everyone partaking in the design process to speak the same language when doing so. It is also useful for its ability to import and export files to other BPM systems if needed, giving you further flexibility to share and view your designs. BPMN 2.0 is the current form of BPMN and is one of the most popular modeling languages, so your process design software should definitely feature it.
Collaboration tools
Exceptional process design can only happen with the participation of everyone involved in the process. Process modeling software should include tools that allow users to view, edit, and comment on different aspects of the diagrams in real-time, no matter where in the world they may be. Creating a process design jointly as a team ensures that the process is as efficient as possible thanks to everyone’s input and perspective. With process modeling, the more the merrier, so your design software absolutely needs to feature collaboration tools.
Conclusion
Process design is vital for ensuring cost-efficient, timesaving and optimized procedures, and building your company without it means you’re potentially losing time and money. Businesses are becoming more aware of the importance of process design; it is becoming a top priority for many companies. Despite this, many are still in the dark about the most important tools they need in order to ensure the best designs possible.
Pen and paper certainly won’t provide any of these four key features to you, so be sure to invest in a proper process design software for your company. If you are uncertain about investing money and resources into a new software, then you’re in luck – Studio Creatio Free is available for you to use in just a few clicks, all at no cost. With powerful software that can provide and enhance these four important aspects of process modeling, you and your team will be able to create the best blueprints possible for your business.
