Book Image

Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio

By : David Parker, Senaj Lelic
Book Image

Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio

By: David Parker, Senaj Lelic

Overview of this book

Every business has process flows, but not all of them are fully described to or verified for accuracy with each stakeholder. This not only presents a risk for business continuity but also removes the ability to make insightful improvements. To make these complex interactions easy to grasp, it’s important to describe these processes visually using symbology that everybody understands. Different parts of these flows should be collaboratively developed and stored securely as commercial collateral. Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio helps you understand why it is crucial to use a common, systematic approach to document the steps needed to meet each business requirement. This book explores the various process flow templates available in each edition of Microsoft Visio, including BPMN. It also shows you how to use them effectively with the help of tips and techniques and examples to reduce the time required for creating them, as well as how you can improve their integration and presentation. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the skills needed to create data-integrated business flowcharts with Microsoft Visio, learned how to effectively use these diagrams collaboratively, but securely, and understood how to integrate them with other M365 apps, including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Power Automate.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

The basic idea of the BPMN approach

Here, we will learn how and why the BPMN approach was introduced. Business process modeling and documentation with tools is nothing new – there have been tools available since the early 1990s. Whenever you need to describe a business process, the first question is, how do you depict the various components of a business process that needs to be described? In the past, there have been several approaches to achieve this.

One of the older approaches was introduced by the company SAP AG in the early 80s, which was one of the first approaches to document business processes in a standardized manner. It is known by its original German name, Ereignisgesteuerte Prozesskette (EPK). The English term for this is an Event-Driven Process Chain (EPC).

Also, the ISO consortium had another definition of how business processes should be documented in a visual standard – this standard is today one of the most commonly known and used, which we learned...