ASQ Boulder

American Society of Quality Professionals

Jul 2018 Member Gift Bundle: Process Mapping and Improvement

| Filed Under: News

ASQ National Members only – Free Monthly bonus

Download and view your bonus today

Jul 2018 Member Gift Bundle: Process Mapping and Improvement

Information

A picture of a process is truly worth a thousand words.

Whether you’re implementing ISO 9001, Lean Six Sigma, Baldrige, or business process management, process mapping and flowcharts play a critical role in understanding the current state of a process and its potential improvement.

The benefits of documenting and visualizing a process are numerous, including formalizing your understanding of the process to promote consistency, getting your team aligned to avoid conflicts, and revealing wasteful steps or nonvalue-adding activities to improve efficiency and the bottom line.

In this gift we are giving you lots of resources to help you realize these benefits, including two best-selling e-books on process mapping and process improvement, webcasts and videos of experts and practitioners on the topic, and process templates you can download and use today.

Overview: A Basic Overview of Process Flowcharts

ASQ’s librarian can help you find information in the Quality Body of Knowledge (QBOK), which includes books, journal and magazine articles, conference proceedings, case studies, and benchmarking reports.

  • When to use a flowchart
  • Basic procedures for creating a flowchart
  • Flowchart considerations
  • High-level and detailed examples

Free Workbook: Map Your Processes, Second Edition (PDF, 112 pp)

This peerless best-seller is a hands-on, step-by-step workbook of instructions on how to create flowcharts and document work processes.

No other book even comes close in teaching practitioners these crucial techniques.

This second edition includes several new types of process maps.

While the basic, straightforward flowchart is still used, it is supplemented by many other types that serve different purposes.

All the mapping techniques have also been updated, the mapping exercise itself is put into a larger context, and organizational examples from many different industries are used throughout to help readers understand real-life applications of the material presented.

Also new is an example case study carried throughout the entire book to illustrate the construction and use of the different types of process maps.

Free E-Books: Process Improvement Simplified (PDF, 192 pp)

Process Improvement Simplified is written for leaders and managers of organizations or enterprises who:

  • Are struggling with their organization’s success
  • Are not satisfied with the current state
  • Are striving to be number one
  • Have heard about the negatives or positives of process improvement (PI) but have never implemented it

But PI is not a panacea; it takes leadership commitment and involvement, plus organizational behavior modification so that PI becomes a disciplined way of life.

It entails hard work through dealing with nitty-gritty details.

This is a how-to book with simple examples. A step-by-step method of implementing PI is presented using the example of running a restaurant business.

ASQTV Videos: provides brief introductions to quality topics, as well as tips and best practices from industry leaders and experts in the field.

  • Process Architecture Map – Learn how to use a process architecture map to
    improve the process and identify lean wastes.
  • Value Stream Mapping – Perhaps the most valuable lean tool is a value stream
    map, a flowchart that details every step of a process and can help pinpoint waste.
  • Customer Journey Maps – Lisa Custer, Firefly Consulting, discusses how to create a customer journey map, how it becomes more than a robust voice of the customer tool, and provides a real-world example of a customer journey map in action.
  • Tiered Visual Management -Bryan Krieg, Six Sigma Black Belt, Genesis HealthCare System, explains the tiered visual management process through all four tiers using line of sight metrics.

Webcasts: Process Flowcharts and Maps Webcast (WebEx, 20 min)

Dr. Jack ReVelle, quality expert and ASQ Fellow, walks through the basic elements of process flowcharts and their application to process analysis and improvement.

This is one presentation in a two-hour, seven-part series, The Seven Supplemental Quality Tools.

Bonus! Check out the rest of the tools in this series and gain RU credits:

Tools and Templates: Flowchart Tool (Excel, 125 KB)

Use this downloadable Excel template to create a graphical representation of the steps in a process to better understand it and reveal opportunities for improvement.

Process Templates

We have shared them before, but just in case you missed them, here are lots of process model templates you can use to guide your process mapping efforts.