Business Process Reengineering

Design Skills practiced during course:

The 8 stages of the technological innovation

process
1- Basic research
Basic research is that phase of the technological innovation process that only occurs in large
companies, usually in the pharmaceutical, energy and information technology sectors, which keeps
research and development departments continuously abreast of the state of the art technologies
that most impact their organizations.

2- Applied research
When it detects some specific market needs that may represent an opportunity to develop a
sustainable competitive advantage for the business, the company searches among the technologies
that dominate the way to solve this problem.

At this point, you can integrate existing technologies creatively and innovatively or really develop
something totally new.

3- Development
When reaching a solution to the market need, it’s time to develop the product, service or process
that will be marketed or employed.
 For this, a prototype is developed that must be tested, preferably with the help of the public that
will use it.

Two interesting approaches to this stage of the technological innovation process can be used:

 Design thinking, which takes into account how people interact with innovative products and
services
 Scrum, which promotes small iterations, incremental advances in the prototype and the rest of the
innovation process, always based on the needs of those who will use it.

4- Engineering
With the prototype set, you have to turn it into a scalable product or service that can be mass-
produced or meet the specific needs of an industry.

Materials, suppliers, appropriate forms of storage and transportation are searched, such as
connecting parts and benefiting inputs, defining which professionals will need to be hired and
trained, among other measures.

5- Manufacture
This is one of the most important aspects of the technological innovation process.

It is time to define the best way to deliver the solution created to the final customer, with efficiency
and quality.

6- Marketing
With the product or service ready to be released, it’s time to do concept tests, market research and
market testing to see if any adjustments are still required depending on how their acceptance and
distribution is taking place in test markets.

7- Promotion
Once the market tests are done, the product or service is launched nationally or globally, depending
on the markets the company serves.
This stage of the technological innovation process can use agile marketing, which employs Scrum
and Kanban methodologies to launch the products and services rapidly to achieve results as soon as
possible.

8- Continuous improvement
Once launched, both the product or service and the process flows used to produce and deliver
them to end customers are constantly measured and analyzed, with the aim of looking for ways to
improve them even more, adding even more perceived value to the final customers.

Diagram definitions, maps and process models

Process diagram:
Preliminary representation of the process, which only features basic flows and, in most cases,
without taking into account any failures or problems.

Process map:
The map should add other elements to the primary flow, like business rules, actors, events and
other important points. This work is greatly aided by the use of tools and software and allows a
clearer explanation for the process owners of what is happening and what is mapping, especially
when managers do not have expertise in BPM.

How to draw a flowchart in 5 steps

1- Define responsibilities
If you plan to learn how to draw a flowchart to better understand a process, the first step is to
identify the roles involved.

Pools: they have one or more lanes, and represent an entire process. There’s usually only one pool
in one process, but several can be included to represent the relationship between multiple
processes.
Lanes: represent a team, system or role in the process. Examples: HR Manager, Personnel
Department, Service Desk and others. Avoid putting the name of the person executing the task in
the lane, instead you should create a role. Example: Ticket scheduler, Manager, etc.

2- Add an initiator
The initiator event marks how a process will be started.

In the design of your flowchart you can indicate that the process is started manually by a person, by
receiving an email, by integration with information systems, by a timer or in several other ways.

In BPMN notation the initiator event has a simple bounding line, and in HEFLO the green
background.

For this exercise, include in your flow a manual initiator, represented by the element without a
trigger (without an icon) and with the description “Start”.

Good practice tip:

You can include multiple initiators in your process. There’s no restriction, but it is recommended
that the flowchart contain at most one manual type initiator in your design.

3- Add tasks and deviations

After applying the initiator it’s time to include tasks and deviations. These are the elements that will
determine the logic of your process.

Tasks can be human or systemic. If your goal is to model a simple flow, then focus your attention on
human tasks. Here’s an example:

Note that the initiator was connected to the first task by a sequence flow, which is a flow element
connector.

Like initiators, BPMN offers several types of tasks for you to create a process flow chart. See the
types:
Another type of important element in flow design is gateways, which define deviations from your
flow. The simplest type is the Exclusive Gateway, which indicates only 1 possible output path to
your flow, but there are several other types of gateways for process flow diagram design.

In the example below, after the approval task, the process can follow one (and only one) of two
paths: a purchase, or communicating the cancelation.

4- Mark the end of the process

Now is the time to indicate in the flowchart design how the process finishes. As in the other
categories of elements, there are several types of end elements:

In this exercise select the finisher that has the label “End”.

You can add multiple finalizers in your process and the only recommendation is for it to have on the
label the final situation generated by the finalizer.

Example: In an employee termination process a possible situation would be “employee

terminated”.

5- Review your flowchart design

After you mark the beginning and ends, detour points, activities, waits, etc., mentally redo the
process and see if there is anything that you can improve in order to portray it more accurately.