What is Process Mapping in Business? A Detailed Guide
Last updated: 30th September 2025
First published: 13th July 2024
In the quest for efficiency and clarity, businesses have long sought to understand and optimise their internal workings. Business process mapping emerged as a critical discipline for visualising complex workflows, and this practice is now made easier with business mapping software.
Whether you are a business leader looking to optimise operations or a team member trying to understand a new workflow, this guide will provide you with the essential knowledge you need to get started.
We’ll walk you through the fundamentals of process mapping, from its purpose and benefits to the practical steps of creating your own process maps with our modern, easy-to-use tool, Liberty Spark.
In Netcall’s guide to process mapping, you’ll learn about:
If you’d like to discover the details of how process mapping helps your business in particular, contact us for a demo.
What is a business process map?
First, what is a process? A process is a set of activities or tasks that are carried out to deliver an outcome. For most organisations, that outcome is usually tied to revenue.
Process mapping, or business process mapping, means the practice of looking at all the actions that your organisation does and visualising them in the form of a map, or a visual diagram like a flowchart. These may be actions that occur daily, monthly or annually. The maps exist to detail:
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How are you accomplishing your goals?
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Showing the order of tasks
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Who is in charge of what action
If an organisation wants to be successful, it needs to understand its processes to identify areas for improvement or potential issues. The process of capturing how things work is often also referred to as process capture or process discovery.
A process diagram or map is how we record that process. As we said earlier, it is a visualisation of your process. This is often presented on a single page to make it easy to read and understand, with arrows demonstrating the following steps to achieve an outcome:
The purpose of process mapping for businesses
Systems implementation and automation
Many organisations are turning to technology to help streamline their businesses. Before making any investment in computer systems, an organisation must understand precisely how they do certain tasks. By mapping a process first, the organisation can understand what the steps are and who does what.
A process map will identify repetitive work and then allow the organisation to design and build systems that can do the work instead. It’s much better to plan this out in this way than to purchase technology and then add it into a process willy-nilly. This will always end up costing more if not thought out properly.
Mapping out your process allows you to truly understand and set realistic expectations of how automating certain steps will help you thrive. Conversely, if you do not obtain the results you want, you also know when something is not working, allowing you to cut costs as needed.
Continuous improvement
If you capture or map a process as part of your continuous improvement practice, you can significantly benefit your organisation.
Capturing a process allows you to find inefficiencies, bottlenecks or unnecessary costs that perhaps you weren’t aware of before. It also helps you identify potential risks and find ways to mitigate them.
Using process maps as a baseline allows you to ensure that your organisation is using a common language when describing processes. You will usually run into repeated steps across multiple teams, which helps align them correctly. By taking the time to map the process, you make sure your organisation is consistent and rigorous in its approach to improvement, allowing you to grow and scale successfully and correctly over time.
If you do not choose to practice continuous improvement, you will never be able to grow correctly. A process map is your vehicle for a stable company and revenue growth. We delve into the subject of continuous improvement later in this guide.
Standards and compliance
Using process discovery ensures that your organisation maintains consistent and high-quality procedures. Mapping a process out ensures you follow the required rules and regulations. All organisations need to conform to official standards of some sort within their industry.
Using process discovery ensures that your organisation maintains consistent and high-quality procedures. Mapping a process out ensures you follow the required rules and regulations. All organisations need to conform to official standards of some sort within their industry.
Organisational design
As we’ve established, if you are looking at your organisation and the future, then taking the time to map your processes gives you a distinct advantage. When defining all the important actions, you will also identify who is responsible for what.
This also helps ensure that the person doing the job is the right person. If you are reorganising, then this is really key!
Process discovery will ensure that you are able to put the right person in the right part of the organisation to deliver the best results. It will also help you identify any missing steps or roles that need to be created to cover specific responsibilities.
And it is instrumental in learning why ‘sign-off’ bottlenecks may be occurring, slowing down your entire business. Without a map, you might never find out how much time you are actually wasting.
Change and transformation
This may also sometimes be referred to as the ‘As Is vs To Be’ process. There are two stages to your process mapping. Essentially, you need to understand the difference between how things work today and how you want them to work in the future.
By capturing your processes, you’ll understand where the gaps are and find spots that could use some improvement.
You can then map out the future by making process changes and seeing how they impact your numbers and improve the overall process. This can be achieved by clearly assigning responsibilities, changing a sourcing location, or making any other adjustments to enhance it.
Benefits of process mapping
Mapping out your processes comes with so many benefits and advantages – even in a process mapping guide it is difficult to mention them all! But to help you understand its importance, here are the key reasons why your organisation should be investing in process mapping to ensure they continue to lead the way.
1. Gives you the ‘big picture’
Process capture provides a snapshot of organisational operations. It helps identify duplicated tasks or gaps causing issues by enabling departments and leaders to share their activities. Often, a single, easily solvable issue affects multiple departments; communication fostered by a “big picture” view is key to resolving these.
2. Gather information
Centralised process mapping software acts as a process library, enabling easy access for employees, aiding training, facilitating improvements and identifying issues. Process discovery uncovers any type of vital organisational data: costs, risks, time, bottlenecks and system usage are just some of the examples