Process Map · As-Is/To-Be Analysis
Process Mapping (As-Is / To-Be)
What is a process map?
- Reveal the actual workflow in a diagram
- Map what really happens, not what the rules say, and the problem becomes visible
- Most of the time goes to waiting, not working
Once you have drawn a process map, the language of your meetings changes. 'Sales is slow' becomes 'price checks go back and forth between Sales and the Procurement team three times,' and the discussion shifts from people to handoff points. Putting structure where blame used to be is the real value of this tool. That is why a map is better drawn to show how many times work crosses a department boundary on a single page than to look polished.
How you draw the map depends on its purpose. A swimlane map is strong at showing who hands what to whom, while a value stream map attaches work time and wait time to each step to show how lead time breaks down. With the latter, you get the ratio of hands-on time to total lead time, and the fact that most of the time is tied up in waiting becomes a number for the first time. When scoping, writing down suppliers, outputs, and customers first, as in a SIPOC, keeps the map from sprawling endlessly into neighboring departments.
Not every kind of work is a good fit, though. A map works best for tasks that repeat dozens of times a month or more and follow a fairly fixed sequence. For work like new business planning, where the path differs every time, a map gets used once and thrown away. It is also different from a responsibility chart or RACI. A responsibility chart records who owns what, while a map records the order in which work flows and where it stalls. If you try to merge the two into one document, it starts to look like an org chart and the bottleneck disappears from the picture.
The As-Is is where things most often go wrong. Staff treat the interview like an audit and answer by the book, and they never mention workarounds such as a side Excel ledger or verbal approvals. On a map of the rules, the improvement plan ends up as little more than rewording the rules. Another common mistake is handing the To-Be to IT purely as system requirements. If approval authority and internal policies stay as they are and only screens get built, a five-step approval chain simply moves inside the system, and the lead time stays the same after the development spend.
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Eunpyo HongExpert in company analysis, startups, and venture fundraisingIt originated in industrial engineering's workflow charts and flow process charts. Through the business process reengineering (BPR) debate led by Michael Hammer and James Champy in the 1990s, designing by contrasting the current state with the target state became established management practice.
Company A distributes industrial parts, with 140 employees and annual revenue of KRW 62 billion (≈ US$46,386,400). It took 6.8 days on average to send a quote after receiving a customer inquiry, and urgent deals kept going to competitors. The Head of Sales ordered a five-week flow analysis, saying, 'Let's start by mapping why it is slow.' (Hypothetical example)
- Kim, a senior manager on the Sales Planning team, pulled system records for 412 quotes from the past three months. Kim set the scope from receiving an inquiry to sending the quote, and excluded returns and claims.
- They interviewed six salespeople and the procurement and technical support staff separately and drew the flow. It revealed a verbal price check step that appeared nowhere in the rules, and one salesperson said, 'We just ask in the group chat, like always.'
- When they recorded work time and wait time for each step, only 4 hours 20 minutes of the 6.8 days involved hands-on work. The rest was spent waiting for Procurement to reply and for approvals.
- The bottlenecks narrowed to two. Price replies for non-standard items averaged 2.9 days, and even KRW 5 million (≈ US$3,740) orders went through division-head approval, adding another 1.6 days.
- The To-Be included registering a standard price table in advance and giving team leads final sign-off on orders under KRW 10 (≈ US$1) million, and a revision to the credit policy was submitted alongside. Three months later, average lead time fell from 6.8 days to 2.3 days, and cross-department handoffs dropped from 7 to 4.