Business process modelling notation, or BPMN as it’s commonly known, refers to a precise notation for documenting business processes designed to remove the ambiguity of textual process specifications by depicting the sequence of business processes visually as an information flow.

It is similar to the Universal Process Notation (UPN) we use here at Skore, another visual methodology, but there are some key differences we will explore today as we conduct an in-depth analysis of BPMN.

How Is BPMN Helpful?

Business map processes to find out how things are working, to document how, and to then search for ways to improve it.

BPMN’s big selling point to do so is that it provides one unifying notation for all processes. In this way, all business stakeholders can understand the charts and flows.

BPMN helps organisations understand and document their business processes to identify key areas for improvement. The notations utilised by BPMN in their business process diagrams are comprehensive and rich, there are a wide range of shapes and symbols at your disposal to enrich your diagrams. 

And the industry standard is developed by the Object Management Group (OMG) consortium since 2005, a not-for-profit industry group that ensures the standardization of the notation and processes is maintained. It means there is someone overseeing it constantly, and that business can turn to it if they are confused at any point.

Once the entire process is captured on a diagram, businesses can begin to analyse where they can improve upon their existing methods. Where they can switch up their spending or time management to avoid unnecessary expenses or time-consuming tasks and instead boost their revenue. 

This does not come without some drawbacks, however.

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What Are the Limitations of Business Process Modelling Notation? 

For all that it is helpful, BPMN does have some limitations.

The first problem is the amount of training required for someone to understand and follow along on the chart made using BPMN. In 2016, ​​to know how to use the software tool you needed to download and understand a 7.1 MB PDF of 538 pages. It’s great that BPMN is standardized to avoid confusion, but this type of approach with too specific instructions for symbols and usage will still limit who is actually able to use and understand it.

This is because BPMN can become very visually complex. But then this does not help one efficiently follow along and understand the processes, does it?

Similarly, due to the visual complexity of the charts, a lot of important information ends up missing, and the flows begin to look messy.

For instance, decision diamonds and swim lanes, both parts of BPMN charts, will take up a lot of space on the chart. They will add a lot of new symbols and notations, resulting in the overall understanding of the process becoming more complicated and convoluted than it originally was. And, because there is a lack of space for the amount of information needed to be conveyed, the map can become even larger and more complicated, or information may get lost.

Furthermore, the action boxes in BPMN are based on the owner, while in UPN they are based on the order of action. When performing an analysis, the entire title of the box has to be read to ensure everyone is on the same page, as opposed to simply following along via the next step.

The notation itself also causes confusion. BPMN relies on symbolic precision to communicate actual processes. While machines may respond to symbols, however, humans do not, and there is often room for error and interpretation of certain symbols in a process depending on how they are diagramed and used. In this way, BPMN then suffers from the same drawback as other business process mapping options, despite being touted as the answer to process ambiguity.

BPMN is so structured that you lose out on context at times, and by relying on the symbols you end up running into the same issue as before. A visually complex diagram can sometimes have multiple interpretations and a lack of additional context for each process.

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What Are Some Alternatives to BPMN?

Given the issues with BPMN, let’s explore the alternatives.

The first option would be to turn to BPMN’s origin, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagram. Originally created for software development, UML is the base of BPMN. The main problem is that there are fourteen different versions of this diagram, and selecting the right one and then communicating it to anyone that is not an expert or familiar with UML becomes a problem. While UML has been acknowledged as great for object-oriented processes, when it comes to larger business processes BPMN is the natural successor. And UPN is then the natural successor of BPMN, as we will find out.

You can also always return to a good, old-fashioned flowchart. The precursor to all of the diagrams we are talking about, flowcharts continue to exist and be useful for a reason. But when it comes to mapping out business processes, flowcharts can get messy and illegible very quickly. As they rely on sequential sequences of events, flowcharts fail to account for parallel activities or previous activities that are also part of larger processes. And in a large company, a lot of processes have parallel events that need to be documented to ensure everyone knows what is happening.

Data flow diagrams (DFDs), which were developed in the seventies, are used to capture how data flows in an organisation. They do not strictly work for business processes, as they are not exactly a flow or step-by-step diagram, but they do capture how data is working within an organisation. You might find a use for them if your business is driven by data, or perhaps as an analytical tool for a specific process within your business to understand how data is flowing.

Gantt charts have also been around for a while – since the late nineteenth century in fact. These charts focus on deadlines, by creating subtasks to a larger task with specific time frames. They are still used by some companies for processes that are time sensitive to organise themselves, and they have also been known to be used in academic circles. However, the information presented in them is not exactly a flow, and it is too simplistic to capture the entirety of a complex business process as they exist today.

Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) diagrams come to us from the 1950s US Navy. They make use of circles or rectangles, called nodes, to represent project milestones or events. These are then linked by vectors, which correspond to the various tasks required to arrive at that milestone or event. These diagrams break down the individual tasks of a project for analysis and help identify task dependencies. Their main focus is helping the business find the best ways to save time, but as a result of this focus, they can be quite difficult to interpret accurately.

A lot of these alternatives have fed into each other over time, bettering the capture of processes slowly but surely. This brings us to the twenty-first-century option, UPN.

We’ve mentioned it a few times in this article because UPN is the culmination of all of the needs a business process map has. It provides a simple notation that anyone can follow along to, without the need for an additional long manual about arcane symbols and their meanings. You can present your process simultaneously to your client or stakeholders, and they can all follow along easily.

It has room for parallel processes, and for both big and small picture processes that work together to arrive at the desired result for the company. And despite this, the charts and diagrams in UPN do not become overly crowded or complex. Instead, they still are presented in a way that simplifies and deconstructs processes down to the basics.

The boxes in UPN maps are also organised by action steps, making it easy to follow along and avoid any possible confusion about where to go next.

UPN works with a computer in mind. Software makes it possible to add smaller parts of processes as subcategories that can be accessed at specific points in the process, decluttering from the larger picture and leaving everything streamlined for the viewer.

We selected UPN as our business process mapping base at Skore because it provides so much clarity for us, and we wanted to share it with our clients. Your business processes are complex, but they can be broken down into small, actionable steps that you and your team can follow along on without needing to consult a manual about symbols constantly. 

Skore also allows for smaller processes to be incorporated into the diagram, and for the attachment of additional informative documents to all the steps. And we focus on answering the questions of what, who, how and when in our diagrams, as we ensure accountability and responsibility is built into the process.

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With UPN and Skore, long manuals and symbols when it comes to process mapping are a relic of the past. With computers making software the natural choice for business process mapping, simplifying everything further and adding attachments it is the clear next step to the future.

It is also really easy for the business to understand your process map and get sign-off from stakeholders easily. You can do a bird’s eye view analysis or drill down to the detail at the click of a button. You can also map at the speed of conversation in a workshop rather than having to spend your evenings mapping out after the event when you are tired or forgetful. With Skore you can also get reporting and analytics. 

Conclusion

We’ve explored and learned about BPMN, its uses, drawbacks, and why UPN is the best alternative in the market today. 

Keeping it simple when it comes to business processes is always best, and UPN captures that notion more than any other diagram available yet.

It is for this reason that Skore relies on UPN for its business process modeling, as we have found it is a game-changing communication tool for companies about their processes, both internally and externally to their own clients.

Want to learn more? Book your demo today to take a look for yourself!

One of the key factors of any successful business is to be constantly assessing and reinventing itself.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you launch a new product or service, that is not what we mean.

But as time moves forward and new helpful technologies emerge, it is always wise to take a look at your existing business processes and see where and when it might be possible to tweak them for improvements. 

Invite your team to participate in these decisions, as they will be the ones more familiar with daily processes and where it might be best to switch things up. With the tools available today, it has never been easier to visualize these processes to find the weak spots.

Software such as Skore makes business process reengineering more efficient and more collaborative for the entire organization – let’s delve into how!

Reminder: What Is Business Process Reengineering? 

Before we truly get started, let’s review what business process reengineering actually is.

Business process reengineering, also known as BPR, is the decision and then action of changing your business’s major functions to increase efficiency, improve quality, and-or to decrease costs. To do this, businesses will create and visualise their processes through flow diagrams such as the ones you can make with Skore, finding and identifying areas of improvement. 

Someone can specialise specifically in this work and be known as a BPR specialist – that’s how important it is. These people will be in charge of identifying the improvement areas and then ensuring that the transition to new workflows goes smoothly.

It’s different from business process improvement, which is solely focused on updating your business’s current processes.

Business process reengineering will instead result in fundamentally different systems across your organization. It means significant and absolute change at the very beginning of all your existing processes. After all, to make an omelette, you have to crack a few eggs.

There are four steps to follow when conducting business process reengineering.

Firstly, professionals will need to understand all the company’s processes and identify problem areas. This means having access to all existing workflows and a backlog of information that led to the decisions to make the workflows as they currently exist. Not all of this will be readily available, which itself may be an indicator of something to fix in the process. 

As soon as a problem is identified, it must be communicated to the relevant stakeholders in the organisation. Skore makes it easy to visualise these for both your own processes and for clients. With Skore, stakeholders and clients can understand and follow along with the current workflow and with the suggested improvements.

Once the issue has been identified and communicated, and everyone is in agreement that it needs to be changed, it’s time to take action to fix it. This means assembling and bringing in an expert team. 

Two essential players here are a senior-level employee and an operational employee. You will need the senior-level employee to oversee the bigger tasks and have access to important information, and having someone that is on the ground with processes and operations will be incredibly helpful for the next part. Additional team members can be selected based on need.

Having assembled your team and found your problem, you now analyse it further. What are the measurable KPIs that tell you it is not working and would be able to demonstrate if anything changes? And what would you have to change to make it visible? 

Make different flow charts with different results depending on what you can switch up. Follow along to the logical end result each time to get an idea of what will have the best and greatest impact.

Finally, you implement the change and see the results play out in real time, saving your business money and resources.

Why Do Business Processes Need to Be Reengineered?

Why would businesses reengineer their processes from the ground up when they can just keep improving them?

It all boils down to five key factors, which we will be examining in detail.

Updating company vision

The first thing business process reengineering helps with is revisiting the company’s mission and vision.

Companies change over time, because markets, culture, and sensitivities change. If a company wants to remain relevant and competitive, it will need to adjust accordingly to the times. To make sure you don’t stagnate, reengineering business processes allow leaders to re-familiarise themselves with their products and services and come up with new ways to attract customers.

A great example here from the last decade is Netflix: going from a rental service to a streaming service and becoming a pioneer. Because they were willing to reengineer their business processes, they came up with a blueprint that made them unique in the market before multiple other companies followed their lead.

Simple operations are best

The worst thing for any business process is over complication.

Just like when you’re trying to train for a sporting event and the best thing you can do is simplify your diet to protein and non-processed foods instead of relying on fad diets or super smoothie mixes, taking everything down to basics is best.

By making your business processes simple and streamlined, your operations will flow naturally, effortlessly, and efficiently. Remove obstacles by analysing and reengineering your business processes to arrive at straightforward solutions and workflows.

This results in happy employees and happy customers, as everything works correctly and without too many hoops to get through. 

Increased efficiency

Every business wants to be efficient. To do this, you need to study your operations in your organisation and make sure they are simple and streamlined. 

Less time spent by employees trying to figure out processes means more time dedicated to getting things done instead of just waiting to move them along. Increasing efficiency is a very easy and achievable result of business process reengineering.

Better results and products

As a direct consequence of the above, your products or services will increase in quality because your employees will have more time to dedicate to them. They will not be worried about how the work should flow, but about making sure it happens.

Your company will also have more time to be reactive to feedback from customers instead of making sure processes are flowing correctly, thereby improving the quality of your customer’s experience with you.

This leads to our next and final point.

More profit

Business process reengineering is absolutely responsible for more profit and greater ROI for companies. 

If we think of the Netflix example mentioned previously, reengineering their entire process and brand allowed them to become an untouchable giant for quite a few years, and absolutely increased their revenue.

Business process reengineering leads to lower operating costs, more accurate company goals, better communication, and higher quality of products or services. All of which result in higher profits.

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How to Reengineer Business Processes 

So how should you go about reengineering your business processes?

Well, let’s take a look at some of our clients here at Skore and how their situation fits with our five key factors.

Foxability

Our client Foxability helps companies figure out which cloud-based software will help them best for their business needs. They are constantly evaluating business processes and searching for ways to improve them.

When they came across Skore, magic happened.

Not only was Skore useful in demonstrating places for improvement for their clients, but it also allowed them to map the necessary steps to get there and what that improvement would look like. The team at Foxability makes multiple flow charts or process maps with Skore to demonstrate real-time monetary gains from reengineering processes based on the new technology available, leading to more streamlined operations, increased efficiency, and better company results overall.

And Skore’s simple and easy-to-follow approach to map visualization allows this to happen daily.

NHS

When the NHS Trusts in South London were looking to improve their mental health services operations for children and youths, they turned to Change Platform Consulting to revisit their existing processes and how they may be able to change them.

This was quite a tall order for the consulting firm, as the NHS’s existing processes had been unchanged for quite some time. It required an entirely new workflow: a business process reengineering.

In stepped Skore.

Using Skore, the consulting firm led a series of workshops to understand and evaluate the current processes. They were able to reconfirm and envision the new goals and design new, streamlined processes that aligned with the new vision.

The results of their reengineering saw success within the first nine months: 

• A 75% reduction in the children and youths of the area being found outside it
• Inpatient wards capacity in the area increased from 52% to 90%
• A 12% underspend against budget

Business process reengineering worked marvellously and all the parts of the process that were changed had a significant effect, of that there is no doubt. Reviewing your process and analysing it to find where you can make things different will absolutely have lasting impact. 

Lawrence & Wedlock

The team at Lawrence & Wedlock, an automation services provider, was already familiar with cutting-edge technology and software. What they needed was a way to make the RPA process discovery workflow more agile.

Along came Skore.

Prior to making contact with us, they were using a variety of tools that made it hard to keep track of who had access to what, where, and when, and were not collaborative or well-integrated with each other. It slowed everything down and made them inefficient.

With Skore, their average process discovery time with a client went down by a full week.

Using Skore with their clients also meant that the clients could understand and visualize their processes better. When improvements or reengineering were needed based on the work Lawrence & Wedlock provide, it was easy to see the outcome and explain it. 

More streamlined operations meant a more efficient team, resulting in better service for their clients. And of course, an increase in profit and clients. 

Bovis Homes

Similar to the NHS, Bovis Homes has a long history of processes having a certain workflow.

Bovis Homes ran through the entirety of our five key reengineering points. 

They had experienced a period of rapid growth and needed to reevaluate their company vision and goals following this. Yes, they had grown, but the processes did not reflect this growth yet. And it was felt across the company.

So they went back to the drawing board and reconsidered. 

They used Skore to revisit processes and change them as they went along, ensuring that they were creating procedures and best practices that aligned with industry standards for health, quality, and safety. And they did this collaboratively with teams and stakeholders from seven regions in the UK, all with just one software. They then made sure that every role was accounted for and that those that needed access at every pertinent level could consult back to what was built. 

Their key mission was to once again place the customer at the centre of their business following their period of growth. Bovis Homes made use of Skore to reengineer their existing, previous business processes to look towards the future. As they continue to edit and improve their procedures across all their regions, they are able to go back to Skore and add notes and new factors to take into account. 

They are streamlining their processes constantly to arrive at higher efficiency and better products for their customers and better systems for their workers, to achieve even greater profit heights.

Conclusion

Business process reengineering is not easy. It takes time and means you have to be willing to accept big changes.

But as our clients prove, the payoff is worth it.

Skore makes business process reengineering easier than ever with our simple, streamlined approach to process mapping, and our team of experts willing to walk you through how best to make use of our software.

No more wondering about could be’s or should’s, just efficiency and more revenue for you and your business.

What are you waiting for?

Get in touch with us to book a demo today!

Business process management software is a necessity for any business looking to grow and succeed.

Mapping processes allow businesses to be organized, understand what is happening and detect areas of improvement and opportunities for growth. 

Without visualizing these processes, it is very difficult to find pain points or stop gaps in places where things could be improved. Anything from a task duplicating unnecessarily to finding time-saving processes can be seen a lot clearer when you visualize and capture processes.

And with the software available on the market, it is no longer necessary to do all of this with sticky notes, paper, and pen. 

Instead, you can have all of this information easily accessible on cloud-based software for the entire company, with relevant teams and departments having access to relevant content or areas in which they need to engage with others. 

It has become a lot easier, and we can prove it.

We have had several successful case studies here at Skore, illustrating exactly how much a good business process management software can make a difference for companies and businesses of all kinds. 

But today we wanted to highlight and share three specific success stories from three different clients that demonstrate this even further.

The NHS 

Our first success story is related to mental health services for children and young adults. 

Three NHS Trusts in South London ran a New Models of Care pilot program in 2017. It was aimed at bettering the experiences children and youths had during inpatient placements by Mental Health Services. It was posited that by reducing the distance young people and their families had to travel to these placements, the well-being of the patient would see a drastic improvement.

They worked with Change Platform Consulting to run a series of workshops to arrive at this conclusion, and its solution. During the workshops, they studied the process and found places where it could use some tweaking for improvement by using Skore as one of their tools.

Because of Skore’s simplicity, the consulting group went back to the basics of their processes. It challenged them to think of why certain processes worked the way they did, in what way, led by whom, and who else should be involved. 

While these might seem simple, questions such as these uncover how a process is working, and where it can be improved. They are absolutely vital to establishing new processes and improving on old ones.

And this is exactly what Skore was able to help them do.

Because of the approach to process management we take at Skore, taking everything down to the original groundwork, it was possible to rework and study established processes and find their flaws. No process is forever perfect, as they have to change and evolve with time, and this is why having everything as simple and clear as possible is best.

It makes it easy to find the places that are having a domino effect on the rest of the process, and come up with ways to fix them. 

It also makes it easy for everyone to understand who is doing what, when, and why. 

Due to the fact that it is cloud-based and collaborative, everyone who needs to know can access and see it as well. 

Thanks to partnering together to study the current processes, there was a 90% increase in the use of inpatient wards by local children and youth. Along with this, a 12% underspend against budget and a 75% reduction in children and youth staying outside the South London area. 

And these results came about solely in the first 9 months.

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Scrutton Bland

Business process management software can be used in any field, and our next success story proves it by switching gears.

Accounting firm Scrutton Bland had to undergo some changes due to the UK Government’s Making Tax Digital initiative. They realized that they needed to get ahead of the curve and begin to study how to digitize their current processes to stay competitive and deliver great service to their customers.

Their solution?

Bring in Skore to involve their clients directly in the business process management.

They developed SB Digital as a service to aid clients in improving their business processes with the latest technology available. 

To show them exactly how this would work, SB Digital called on Skore for support. Skore is used by the team when they’re working through the processes with their clients. They go through the business process mapping together and are able to show them as they review the steps where they see room for improvement.

By doing this in tandem with them, clients are able to readily understand their reasoning at the moment. They see their current systems mapped and how long it is taking them to finish certain activities, and SB Digital is able to pinpoint these savings with them. Together, they are then finding solutions to the issues they come across.

For the clients, it becomes a clear set of steps and task lists to improve upon their existing processes, and seeing them visually mapped out helps them envision what they are working towards. And mapping out how they will look improved makes them even more determined and willing to take on the necessary steps.

Once again, Skore’s visualization of processes and simplicity makes this possible. SB Digital is not making complicated process maps for each individual client based on their industry, but instead using UPN with the Skore tool across multiple clients.

And they are not relying on analogue means.

Both the client and the SB Digital team can refer back to the maps when needed, without having to hunt down a specific sticky note or drawing from several years ago. 

Thanks to Skore’s collaborative, simple approach as a business process management software, the team at SB Digital is able to truly communicate their suggestions to their clients in real-time, and show them realistic, attainable results to work towards.

Cielo

Skore worked with Cielo, a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) company, to improve communication between the Client and Project Teams. They want to make sure that their clients are attracting the best candidates possible. So the goal for their project in  Skore was to onboard new clients faster while maintaining high-quality and efficient services.

This was because their current tools were complicated and rigid. By utilising Skore, the simplicity, ease, and collaborative nature of the software for business process management made it a lot easier for both Cielo and their clients to find common ground.

This is because Cielo begins its onboarding process by reviewing their client’s current recruitment process, looking for improvement opportunities that meet best practice models. They were able to use Skore for this part of the process when working with their clients, and soon began to adapt it to other aspects of their business.

From work stream to client engagement and organisational structures, Skore covered all the bases that Cielo needed to create rapport with their clients. Because of how flexible and simple Skore is as a tool, Cielo was able to change and shift parts of processes in tandem with their clients instead of creating a new process flow constantly. 

By showing clients a process map that then includes additional components about each aspect of each specific process in real-time, the team at Cielo was able to make their presentations and conversations with clients a lot more engaging. The software made it possible to draw the attention of the clients a lot more to the high-level decisions and opportunities than the pages of details in a process map.

All clients can follow along and sign off at the moment instead of having to take homework home. It makes the life of business analysts a lot easier to have all stakeholders and leaders involved engaged and at the moment as they are presenting.

Cielo also began to implement Skore internally, to help train their team and create processes for recruitment. And to talk to each other more.

Because it is one software with the same notation, all the company teams are able to contribute and communicate on Skore. It makes it significantly easier for teams to understand each other’s rhythm and tasks, and to work together. And it also makes it possible to find places in their own processes where they can improve, such as by adopting new tools and technologies.

Skore can be consulted anytime for clarification, as all the information is easily accessible so that all teams can access it for both themselves and their clients. Especially as they start adding improvements to existing processes.

With Skore, Cielo has optimized not only their client’s business processes but also their own, using business process management software and moving away from the pen and paper methodology of the past.

Conclusion 

Business process management software is the future, and it is here to stay.

All of our clients have encountered success and growth following the implementation of Skore in their day-to-day processes, even from a quick consultation.

If you want to stay ahead of the curve and know where you can improve and grow your business, just as our clients have, get in touch today to book a demo and access a free trial of Skore!

Being a business analyst is not for the faint of heart.

Whenever you think you’ve got everything lined up to work correctly, something invariably comes up and disrupts your carefully planned list of steps.

Going with the flow and adjusting course accordingly is definitely something all business analysts get better at with time. 

Still, in today’s world, tools exist to make their lives more manageable than in the past.

Business analysts no longer have to fear their day-to-day at their work and how many fires they’ll have to put out – the software exists to make this easier.

Let’s take a look at how.

Being a Business Analyst Is Hard 

Before looking at the solution, it’s necessary to understand the problem.

And the difficulty is that being a business analyst or business process manager requires a lot of moving parts that, sometimes, you have no control over. Because this is the nature of business processes: they should run regardless of who’s there or not. Especially if, as a business analyst, you’re aiming to improve existing processes.

A lot has been said about the challenges business analysts face daily. And a lot of it is true. 

Mapping out a new process or way of doing something is an uphill climb that a business analyst faces constantly. There will always be scepticism, those “we always did it this way before, and it was working fine” folks, that you will have to overcome. 

Businesses that have been doing processes that take too long or that do too many processes at once to try to compensate for a failure elsewhere are typically too involved in them to recognize these issues. Or, even if they are aware, they may lack the resources, time, or know-how to truly address them with a solution. Assuming they don’t fight you on every step of change to their process management.

And it won’t just be your average employee that you will have to teach.

Getting all stakeholders to follow a particular process is its own battle. Anything from a lack of cooperation to a lack of time from stakeholders will affect capturing and improving the process, and then making sure the process is being followed.

A lot of the time, they will also be reticent to the sharing of information. 

Either top-down or between different areas of the company, or as you are trying to understand their current processes and find places to improve them. Or not even know where certain information is. 

Just like in certain bureaucracies, you might be sent to ten different departments for a particular piece of information that was at the starting point all along. And this betrays a process that clearly needs to be aided.

The other issue of working through business processes for an entire organization with multiple departments is the reality that they all most likely have their own processes in place that they believe works for them. 

As you try to establish a standard way of doing things, you will face friction from those that want to stick to what they know. Even if it is harder or less efficient. They will also all try to convince you that their process is the best.

And this is patently untrue. No process is the best.

Business processes can and should always be improved upon based on the changing needs of the business and the available resources at your disposal as technology continues to evolve.

Tips for Working Better As a Business Analyst 

Clearly, being a business analyst requires you to be multiple things at once. 

Leader, follower, creator, adaptor, teacher, student, a variety of roles that most don’t always encounter simultaneously in their day-to-day. 

Business analysts do.

But through all this, there are quite a few ways you can overcome these challenges and come out stronger on the other side. Here are some tips to work better as a business analyst.

Software is mightier than the pen

The first thing to think about is finding the right way to analyse the processes currently in place in your business.

The old sticky note, paper, and pen method is a thing of the past in today’s cloud-based, software world.

With the growing need for collaboration and communication between teams and departments in all businesses, it is a no-brainer to transfer everything from analogue to digital to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Software such as Skore was born from this need.

Paper and pen were a great way to get started on your visualization of processes five decades ago, but with the technology and software available today, this is no longer necessary.

Business process management maps can be designed directly in Skore, and they can then be shared with the team to ensure that everyone has access to what they should. Skore can be used not only for businesses directly but also for training purposes to learn how these processes will work, killing two birds with one stone.

You centralise all process management so you no longer have to go between different departments and people to get an understanding of why something runs the way it does: you can see it clearly on your process map in Skore.

Simple and clear communication is key

In addition to centralising all your processes and maps in one place, you want to make sure that you keep communication simple and clear.

This means, for example, using Universal Process Notation, so that everyone is in agreement about what each part of the map means. No more inaccuracies or arguments about different interpretations, the simple shapes have a specific meaning, and they mean the same in all instances.

Skore uses UPN because we have found it to be the easiest, simplest way to ensure everyone in your team can follow along on all relevant processes. Different departments need to talk to each other in the same language when it comes to business processes, and the best way to understand each other is to be absolutely clear in the meaning of the processes. 

A great example of this is Skore’s work with Highlight. 

We helped them improve growth thanks to cross-departmental communication and collaboration via our mapping software and workshops. The efficiency the team at Highlight and their partners found thanks to our intervention magnified their output and helped them reclaim time that was lost in convoluted processes and lost communication between departments.

For a business analyst, simple and clear communication channels will always be best.

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Manage expectations

As a business analyst, you need to manage the expectations of the business and its stakeholders. When you come in, you start your work by analysing the processes, and then you begin to look into what is possible to achieve.

Just like when you tell your significant other that the hotel you booked has three stars to manage their holiday expectations, so too, do business analysts manage the expectations of what can be accomplished by fixing processes.

How long certain processes take to review and then find the missing link can take time, and as a business analyst, you should be upfront about it.

With a tool like Skore, you can start visualizing it for the rest of the team from the minute you start analysing the processes currently in place. They can see you build them up, or see the final product, and this will help mitigate and manage expectations all on its own.

By virtue of being a collaborative, cloud-based software, your work is easily accessible and engaging. As a result, your company’s understanding of its processes and the amount of work required to change them becomes clear and a realistic goal.

Create accountability

Business process management mapping should also always answer the question of who does what, when. 

When you study processes, you need to know that your dominoes are in the correct order and that the right person is pushing the right one at the right time.

In a restaurant, you’ve got someone taking orders and bringing food to the table. You’ve got a cook making it once the order is reserved. Someone else sitting people down at their respective tables, someone is overseeing inventory, and someone oversees costs. 

It’s the same for any business process for any organization.

Each specific task has to be assigned to someone. And it has to be easy for everyone to know who does what. Because the day that person takes a holiday or a sick day, not only does it have to be clear who should step up, but also what the task actually entails.

At Skore, we use a visual approach to outlining duties and responsibilities as part of our business process management mapping tool. We find that between that and our singular, simple notation, it makes it easy for everyone to follow along. 

Our organization charts and job descriptions, and roles and responsibility matrices also make it easy to figure out who is accountable for what, so that business analysts can simply share it with the specific teams. 

When the time for a meeting to review processes comes up, it becomes a lot easier for both the organization and the business analyst to know who’s doing what when, and therefore to see how you can make process improvements.

Conclusion

Working as a business analyst requires a lot of patience and collaboration.

You work with people from different departments and industries, from all over the corporate ladder, and you need to make sure they are all on the same page.

Whether it’s cultural or language barriers, hierarchical and bureaucratic issues, or a simple lack of time, you navigate through all of these challenges and come out the better for it.

To do it well, you want to make sure you’ve got good business process management and improvement software on your side, and Skore is your best bet. Don’t be shy and get in touch with us to find out more!

This blog was updated on 5/09/22

Ensuring your staff is paid correctly and on time may seem like a simple task at first, but it’s easy for parts of this process to fall by the wayside. 

You don’t want this to happen.

Fortunately, Skore’s software is built to optimise processes and help you as a business leader ensure all of your processes, including payroll, are running smoothly and correctly.

Let’s delve into why the payroll process should be a top optimisation priority for business owners.

Importance of Your Payroll Process

Never underestimate the importance of any process that is part of your business. And payroll should be chief amongst them. 

Any disruption to your payroll process directly affects your employee’s morale and can create trust issues. These trust issues can eventually turn into quick employee turnover, and if you keep going as you are without fixing it, those turnover rates will just keep increasing. And that can get very expensive and costly for any organisation. 

It is vital that your payroll process is as accurate as possible. 

It also affects your reputation as a company, as word will get around if you have issues with your payroll process. And of course, you want to be sure you are compliant with regulations. A badly managed payroll process can lead to trouble in this area too, and to greater costs down the line.

Not knowing your own finances and slowly bleeding out employees are some of the worst positions you can be in as a company. Both of these are directly related to the payroll process. A poor payroll process directly affects employee morale and interest in investing their time in their work. 

To keep your employees and yourself happy, you need to have a great process in place. This process should automate the more monotonous tasks to reduce duplication of labour, and you as a business should be constantly optimising and bettering it. 

Still not convinced?

Here are some examples of tricky payroll situations and tips to help you manage them. 

Payroll Process Tips

Not all payroll processes are the same, nor are they always going to be straightforward. We’ve compiled some specific situations you may come across as a business owner, with suggestions for how to overcome them to have the best payroll process possible.

Payroll Process Ownership

This is often different from organisation to organisation, but you want to know the answers to two questions:

Who is responsible for payroll approval and how often do they need to give it?

In some organisations it is HR, in others it may be the Finance department. But you just need to be sure that it is assigned to a specific title and thus to a specific individual. And that there is a clear chain of command should that individual be unavailable when payday rolls around.

Understanding the roles and responsibilities associated with your payroll process is absolutely vital for your success. So is understanding how the approval process works and ensuring that the system you are utilising automates certain parts of it such as tax calculations to optimise and reduce mistakes.

You also want to check that the system you are using is capable of recording its history of payments and pending payments should you ever need to check. Also, more than one person should be capable of using and understanding it. The last thing you want is to rely on an outdated system that only one person knows how to use – leaner software that is built to be understood by anyone exists.

Infrequent Changes to Payroll

Payroll will go through changes that may happen only once a year.

It can be anything from a pay increase to changes in working hours or taking time off for holidays. But as the one in charge of paying everyone, you need to know how to make note of this in your system for both yourself and your employees.

A lot of the time, line managers will forget to notify the HR department of these types of situations as they are so unique. Even if the employee stresses it to their manager and takes the time off and the manager covers the time, it might not make it all the way to the department managing the payroll process.

A great way to overcome this kind of situation is to make it a part of the existing process to note such an eventuality. Either by automating it or by creating a space for managers to fill in at the end of the month for the HR department.

Just ensure it is always noted as part of the overall payroll process to take these infrequent changes into account. 

Temporary Changes to Payroll

We went over infrequent changes above, but what about temporary changes to payroll?

Leave – sick or maternity leave -, overtime and bonuses are all part of payroll that happen a lot faster and are more temporary. This makes them a prime area for mistakes. 

For example, when someone is on maternity leave, you have to pay them and the person covering for them. You also want to ensure their benefits are not affected in any way. Any error here could lead to costly legal repercussions. 

Similarly, someone taking sick or bereavement leave should not have to come back to work and begin a discussion with payroll services if something has gone wrong.

A solution a lot of businesses and organisations use to track these temporary changes are spreadsheets.

As you can imagine, this is not ideal.

After all, different spreadsheets can get sent to different departments and information inputted incorrectly or missed altogether. Asking your HR department to parse through all of this information when it is closer to payday will undoubtedly lead to errors and disgruntled employees, which can result in a downward spiral that leads you to high turnover rates.

Not to mention this is sensitive information that may be shared with more people than necessary. 

Instead, make sure you are using an automated system that allows you to make changes really quickly and easily to accommodate these fluctuations in your payroll. Look at who sends what and identify where you could change this step to ensure a smoother process.

A great way to analyse how your current payroll process is doing beyond employee happiness is by mapping it out.

Non-Employee Payments

As a business owner, you will come across payments that need to be made and noted that are not related to your employees.

Whether that is a third-party or taxes, these payments will also need to be made and included in your pay slips and your own records. Not only to ensure these are made correctly and on time, but also so that you can keep track of all outgoing payments..

By mapping out this part of the payroll process as well, you know that you want to choose a system that can upload this kind of data for you and that it can work with it. This way you save time and avoid costly mistakes. 

Mapping Out Your Payroll Process

We’ve discussed the importance of mapping out your payroll process in the previous section, but how do you actually get started with doing so?

At Skore we believe that helping companies figure out how to optimise and improve their processes is ultimately a win for us all, and so we are happy to provide a free template library for some all-important processes for businesses. We like to provide you with an idea of how we can help you out.

Our payroll process template, which as all of our templates utilizes Universal Process Notation (UPN), is easy to use and understand for anyone. You do not need to be a business analyst to follow along.

You can see there are two trigger points: the mid-point of the current period with contracted salary information as it is payment time and any contractual changes that may have taken place since the last time. They then go into two different steps with the specific title in charge highlighted below, and they both have the option to attach information – for example, proof of the change in contract.

While it might be easy to compound all of this information in one step, aspects of it may be lost in the long run as people change positions and seek to do things faster but not more efficiently. Mapping it out in this way ensures that no step is forgotten about and costly mistakes are avoided. The Skore template allows you to add all the information you need to your map easily. You can also drill down to more detail if you need to whilst keeping a high-level overview of the process. 

Both boxes have the same output of ensuring the payroll information for the current period is up to date before heading into the next step of processing payroll. This also has two outputs, one being employees getting paid. The other is creating the all-important reports so that your internal financial information is up to date, your third parties are getting paid, and your taxes are also paid. 

No stone goes unturned in the way this process is mapped out. Whoever is in charge, whether they be Payroll or Finance Administrators, HR, or yourself checking in later, can simply follow along with the process to make sure every step is being followed carefully. 

Our template also allows you to assign each step of the process to a role in the organisation. This means you will always know at a glance who is responsible for what. You can quickly pull up a report showing the roles and responsibilities at every step of the way. 

When looking for ways to improve, having such a map is incredibly useful to find places where things are slowed down for any reason – manual reporting as opposed to automated, or a system being used that doesn’t work with your needs.

Mapping out your payroll process and knowing what is happening, when, and who is doing it, is an incredibly important component of a successful business, and one that should be taken seriously when looking to improve processes.

Conclusion

Having an established and streamlined payroll process should never be a difficulty to overcome for a business, but something that falls into place if well-planned out.

It is an extremely important component for the success of any organisation, but one that can become a headache if not handled properly. 

To avoid this happening to you, Skore is glad to provide you with a great starting template to map out your payroll process.

Get in touch if you want to find out more about how we can help.

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Before we get started, I’m going to be honest… I’ve been a fan of UPN or Universal Process Notation for a long time. I’m a self confessed process geek with a love of making things simple and easy for everyone, so UPN appealed to me straight from the get go. In this blog I’d love to share my reasons why UPN is absolutely perfect for process workshops. If you want to win over your team or get the business excited and collaborating in your processes then UPN is definitely the way forward. Just read on to find out why!

1. Shhhh… don’t mention the P word

If you can actually believe it, not everyone loves processes as much as me. And there are some pretty good reasons why. It’s usually down to a bad experience in a workshop. Perhaps they were locked in a dark room for days picking up fallen post it notes from the floor and slowly losing the will to live. It may have been that the workshop created something so complicated that even the attendees can’t understand it days later. The fact is that often process discovery is a traumatic experience, and if you start off like that how are you going to affect successful change?

UPN, however,  is based around a simple two shape system. This means it doesn’t assume any prior experience with mapping processes, and certainly doesn’t require any training to engage with. Everyone in your workshop can read and understand the process from the very start. . 

This means you can run UPN process workshops without even using the word process…. a potential win already?

2. Head in the cloud vs the weeds

Every workshop has these two characters, firstly the person who can see the big picture very clearly, but struggles when asked about the details and secondly one who jumps straight into the detail, and struggles to see how it fits in the wider end-to-end. Both are very valuable members of the team but this can often cause friction and unsatisfactory results in a workshop.

In Universal Process Notation we look at processes hierarchically. This approach encourages you to define the higher level first and then go into the details. Thus satisfying the different characters in the workshop. Once people can see how it works the conversations become more aligned. 

In addition, once you’ve agreed that higher-level, you can have a conversation around who needs to be involved in the lower-level details, cutting down on unnecessary workshop attendees going forward.

3. Hours, not days (or weeks!)

Often process workshops are an all day affair. Think about this for a minute. There’s a very real cost associated with taking experts out of your business to spend time in workshops. Say you’re running 10 workshops, with 4 experts in each, if each workshop is a day long then that’s 40 days! And that doesn’t even count the lost value in what they would have been doing in their day jobs. 

So now imagine the savings you could get from the same output in a 2 hour workshop? 

This is exactly what UPN lets you do. Designed to be used during the workshop, a facilitator maps the process at the speed of conversation. It drastically cuts down the time needed to achieve your goals and is at least 5 times faster than conventional methods.

Not only is the speed an obvious benefit but the ease also brings increased engagement from attendees. You’ll also find people are more open to that ‘quick Zoom call’ to check through a process. 

4. In-person or remote, you decide

“It can’t be as engaging as people standing up puting post-it-notes on a wall… can it?”

Yes it  absolutely can!

Whether you’re in the boardroom displaying the process on a big TV, or sharing your screen through Zoom or Teams, the fact you’re capturing the process in real-time, adding, deleting, moving stuff around… makes it hugely engaging for people. The process will come alive in front of people, it is really compelling, and makes you look pretty impressive too!

It also means you can decide if you want to get everyone in the same room, or ask them to dial in to a remote meeting. 

In our experience, 80-90% of workshops are now held remotely, so choosing an approach that works in this format is crucial to the success of the project.. 

5. A single version of the truth

Finally – imagine if you will a traditional process workshop – the end result will often consist of and is not exclusive too: A visual of the process (typically a Visio PDF/Screenshot), excel spreadsheets capturing requirements / questions / integrations / systems / compliance points,, training docs (perhaps a series of PPTs, short videos if you’re lucky), system links, Specification docs (50-page Word Doc).

It’s no wonder that people leave with a bad taste in their mouth or the work gets forgotten about two months later. 

The beauty of UPN is that the process that you capture in the workshops gets used throughout the project (and beyond!). 

You can add links and structured data (such as requirements, improvement ideas, etc…) against the processes, and importantly, report on it all. 

You’ve also captured it in a way that can be owned, and improved, by the process owners, meaning that this becomes an ongoing asset for the business. Not only that but as you do this in a workshop you can look for sign-off straight away from stakeholders when it’s still fresh in their minds. 

UPN Process Workshops – Valuable Time Spent  

A process workshop is a vital part of any project but it’s not just enough to go through the motions and get the relevant data. We need to be able to engage and excite the business with the changes or improvements that are planned. UPN is the first step to ensuring that not only does your workshop go with a bang but the time spent by everyone there is useful and of real value to the organisation. Creating a living document that can be used, updated quickly and evolved means the effort invested really is returned. Given that UPN is so easy to learn and use, it truly is a win win situation. 

Get in touch – want to learn more about how Skore can help you get the most out of Process Workshops with UPN?

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Re-evaluate your current workforce and take the pain out of your recruitment problems

With the great resignation in full swing and recruitment harder than ever it can feel like you’re spending all your time trying to fill vacant positions with little success. However – have you considered how much could actually be picked up by your existing team without actually hiring anyone new? You could solve your recruitment issues without having to incur high costs or your precious time.

Our clients regularly free up between 10% and 20% of their time by simply mapping out their processes. Typical time savings include realising how often we manually copy information from one file to another or producing reports that no one reads. It’s incredible how a few simple changes to the way you do business can have a massive impact on freeing up time for your people to do the really important stuff. 

The reality is that our work changes all the time and if we don’t regularly take a step back to ensure it still makes sense we quickly end up doing work that adds no value. The exercise of mapping your processes, in flow charts, exposes this hidden waste. It helps people share best practice and challenge why things are done and realise whether they still should be.

Find a Simple Solution to a Difficult Problem

What’s more, your process maps can then act as instructions when you hire people. This means they can be effective as soon as possible. It makes life easier for people and helps them focus on doing a great job ensuring they stay around for the long term.

The challenge for many businesses is that process mapping can be seen as something technical, that requires a lot of expertise and a lot of time to do. But it really doesn’t have to be that way. Skore is based on a very clear and effective 2 shape approach that asks the important questions, what happens? who does it? and why?

With a simple and intuitive interface, almost anyone can start creating rich process flow charts. They can be used to quickly identify wasted effort and to train new starters. Once you have mapped your process you can share them easily with colleagues and measure them to see how long they take. This means you can automatically identify the activities that take up the most time and see how much time you can save by removing or changing them.

Solve your Recruitment Issues

Within days you could be calculating savings of up to 20% in individual processes. These quickly add up and equate to having a whole new person in the business without the costly pain and effort of recruiting a new member of staff and training them. A simple quick win solution to your major recruitment headache. Sign up for a free 14 day trial here.

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