What is the difference between business process mapping and business process management software? The difference is that, unlike process mapping, process management requires mapping the processes and writing the detailed procedures of each process step, and identifying information such as the participant, system in use, inputs, outputs, cost, cycle time, wait time, etc. While business process mapping is a crucial business analysis tool, business process management is vital to business intelligence, continuous improvement, and change management.
Selecting the appropriate solution is essential to ensure that the business can collect the necessary information to support the requirements.
Lucidcharts or Miro have process mapping capabilities that enable cross-functional collaboration and engagement in a virtual setting. These tools benefit business analysts as they help elicit information from their stakeholders because of the real-time collaboration and dynamic interactions that can result from this type of engagement. MS Visio would also be considered a process mapping software, but it is less user-friendly and requires much work offline to clean up the content.
Software like IBM Blueworks Live is a process management software because there will be a collection of process maps and detailed procedures for each step, a standardized list of participants, a standardized list of systems, and other key values for each step to enable proper business analysis. For example, analysis from IBM Blueworks Live can include identifying where participants are being used across all processes, where systems are being used across operations, or individual studies of cycle time or wait time in any single process. There are other solutions such as SAP Signavio, where processes are mapped and analyzed to assess the true value and impact of business changes.
Process mapping and process management software are all still focused on eliciting information from the business to enable further changes.
Process automation tools are a different set of software products focused on workflow automation, rendering manual tasks obsolete.
Examples of Process Mapping Software
Examples of Process Management Software
Examples of Process Automation Software
