How to draw a process flow chart - Swimlane edition using Lucidchart

hi everyone welcome back to my channel so in today's video i wanted to talk to you guys about one of my all-time favorite diagramming application called lucidchart so i know that you guys are familiar with vizio as it's a one of the microsoft offices software that can be used for diagramming purposes but there's also an alternative that you can use online called lucidchart and i've been using it personally for the last couple of years and i just found it very effective because it is actually very user intuitive it's very easy to navigate and you can just sign it up for free you don't have to sign up for premium for your trials but it also shows you different um templates and diagrams so if you're somebody who is not familiar with how to create a diagram you can definitely look at one of their existing templates to get an idea and you can actually leverage that as well so i personally think that it's very important for you to understand how to draw a diagram as an effective business analyst because most people are visual learners for example i sometimes get lost in the weeds when we are discussing about complex system integration without having any diagram or anything to refer to personally i think it's really important for you to understand how to draw a simple diagram and as sometimes projects get more complex and there are more cross-functional teams involved yes some of the diagrams can look a little bit more intimidating because it involves so many different stakeholders but i think it's so i think it's so critical for you to have a basic understanding of how to create a process diagram so then you can actually use it for your meetings or workshops or in your documentation so in today's video i'm going to do a walkthrough end to end of how to create a very simple business process diagram so if this is something that you're interested then just keep on watching so without further ado let's get started so easiest way for you to get started is by creating a simple template you actually have an option to start a blank document or document from template as i mentioned before or you can import from another program if you've been working on another design but what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna for today's purposes i'm just going to show you exactly what i would normally do so as you can see there are many different options and drop downs but i'm going to go ahead and choose build flow charts and swim lane diagrams and i'm just gonna select this one because this is a a basic flowchart with swimlane template so i'm gonna just go ahead and click on this so to give you a brief overview a swimlane diagram is a type of flowchart that delineates who does what in a process so it's actually very useful if you want to see who is responsible for what in a business process and similar to kind of like having lanes in a swimming pool this swim lane diagram provides clarity and accountability by placing process steps within either the horizontal or vertical swim lanes of a particular employee work group or department so normally for me i like to think about what is the overall objective why am i building this diagram who's my audience so i think about these three things uh even before i start um brainstorming some of the ideas but once i'm clear on my audience and what i need to do and what my goals and objectives are then normally i would take a pen and paper and start diagramming and get a rough sketch before i actually create one in lucidchart so in order to facilitate this exercise i just came up with this simple goal which is to draw a business process diagram of integration between purchasing and receiving inventories in a warehouse so this is what you know so far as a business analyst you know that a purchaser submits a requisition which then turns into a purchase order which then needs to go to a manager for approval so once the manager approves it then email notifications get sent out purchase orders then get sent to vendors who then delivers inventories so once those inventories arrive the warehouse manager and their warehouse people will receive them and then enter it into your system so some of the key questions that you need to ask before you begin your diagramming process is who are the key stakeholders involved in this business process and what are the key decision points and what happens next so in this case it would be purchasing and warehouse employees that are going to be involved in the process as well as purchasing manager okay what are the key decision points so there is one of the decisions is that this purchase order can either be [Music] order can be approved or rejected by purchasing manager right and if it gets rejected it has to purchaser has to create a new recognition okay so with this business process in mind let's now go back to lucidchart and see if we can create a flowchart diagram okay so now we're back in our template and i just wanted to let you guys know that there's a quick note section about learn about this template so you can actually take a look and there are some helpful tips such as you know using swimlane so understand which department is responsible for performing each task and then access lucidchart's flowchart shape library which is here and if you want to change it then i think there's more more shapes so here's where you can also go in and change and update the library so without further ado normally you can change the name of the flowchart so instead of flowchart with swimlanes you can say creation of purchasing warehouse inventory process you can name it something else um now we're gonna actually go in and i'm gonna just update the header for each of the zoom lanes so as i mentioned before you can either have horizontal or vertical swim lanes so you can actually change it right here you can also have more lanes or less lane but the first swim lane is going to be represented by purchasing department so i'm going to create purchasing department i'm also going to create warehouse and then those are going to be my 22 swim lanes for now okay so my recommendation is to always start off by adding specific departments because swim lanes are best represented when you're trying to map out processes of different cross-functional teams so in this case we're going to draw the business process of integration of purchasing and warehouse and how they're handling inventory so i think this is how we can start so you can you can actually have um a starting point and then you can also add different processes and decision so if we go back into our notes the first step is purchaser submits a requisition right so this is the first step purchaser submits [Music] so you can just shorten the text to whatever makes the most sense to you and you can also move it around and you can add different steps or directions as you can see from here so purchaser submits requisition and then i'm going to add another process right here so here you can just create a new process and then turns into a purchase order which then goes to the manager and then here you can have a decision of manager approves here and at this point this is okay and at this point this is the decision one of the decisions that we discussed earlier where purchase order can be approved or rejected by purchasing manager if it gets rejected purchaser has to create a new requisition okay so that means um if yes then so in case you guys are wondering why i'm copying and pasting instead of using uh one of these workflows is because of the formatting as you can see um this new process has different formatting than the than existing ones so just for consistency and ease of access that's why i've been copying and pasting so i'm gonna search for an icon and i found the one that i like okay so if manager approves po then email notification gets sent out if it gets rejected then purchaser has to create a new requisition again okay if it's no then we have to go back all the way here okay and then i'm gonna create a new new process oh and then i just realized that i forgot to add vendor okay uh when's pos gets sent to vendor who then delivers inventories right so here is um he's gonna change this to vendor and then i'm gonna here and clear so then once this gets into the vendor then [Music] under uh processes order and also vendor delivers the delivers inventory then here and then the warehouse actually delivers receives receive inventories saved inventories and then i think finally enters it in the system [Music] [Music] okay so this is what it looks like once we're done as you can see let's do a quick walk through to make sure that we capture all the information purchaser submits a requisition which then turns into a purchase order with which then needs to go to the manager for approval so from here we start purchaser submits requisition requisition becomes a purchase order which then manager has to approve if it's yes then there's an email notification that gets sent to the vendor who then processed the order if it doesn't get approved by the manager then we have to go back to this step of where purchaser submits resubmit a requisition and then from here onwards vendor can process the order they make the deliveries and then where our house then can receive those inventories and then enter it into the system and at the end you can actually add another terminator um and then you can actually say [Music] and normally we color it red so this is how it signifies that um this is the end of the process so yeah so this is what the final product looks like so that's it for today's video i hope you guys found today's tutorial helpful let me know if you have any questions in the comments below if you have any tips or tricks that you want to share with the rest of us then feel free to do that too and i'll talk to you guys in the next video bye

Channel: Rich Millennial Mindset

Views: 4,342

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: processflowdiagram, processflowchart, swimlane, businessanalyst, howtodrawprocessflowdiagram, Lucidchart

Id: zOZbakQHVqs

Length: 16min 19sec (979 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020