Customer Reviews

Business Process Mapping: Improving Customer Satisfaction

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book, and it's Workbook companion, aim to impart process modelling knowledge to beginners and it does a good job at that. I have two criticisms of this text; 1) it aims are beginners using really "dumbed-down" language and examples and 2) it does not cover the business process standard notation BPMN.

In positioning this text for beginners the authors have probably identified a good potential market. That said I think this text could be easily understood by my 11 year old son - if he had the interest. It's communication language, examples and style are too low-ball and it does nothing to build the readers capability to enter texts aimed at business, especially management, and academic audiences. Consequently it becomes a laborious, boring read.

The modelling notation used is a basic flowchart approach. For a text to be written and published on this topic without reference to, or examples of, BPMN is doing a disservice to anyone learning modelling. The BPM profession has moved on and is now pervading general management; at both a professional and academic level. BPMN, while arguably imperfect, IS the standard adopted by the community. Choosing to ignore BPMN as the notation to teach process modelling makes this text less relevant to the new modeller as they then have to need to learn a new notation and somehow translate their newly found knowledge - a job I am sure would be much more effectively handled by the authors.

That all said this book does do a good job at helping new modeller understand modelling basics, especially interviewing, decomposition, and model validation.

I have been looking for an effective analytical tool that would help me make get a good understanding of my company's business processes. This book hit the mark by providing me with step by step guidance. Especially helpful was the expense payment process example as well as the hints it provides on what to avoid while performing a process mapping. Overall it was worth the money.

I'm an educator in a midwest insurance company so I related easily to the author's examples which are based on Farmer's Insurance. It is easy to recognize the author's auditing background because their methods are precise and complete. I will use their written experience to conduct classes of my own. I have two observations from the book: 1. Entity types are identified as Process, Unit, Task, and Action. These correspond to Process, Subprocess, Activity, and Step which are somewhat better known; 2. The examples and case study of insurance applications will appeal to those in an identical or similar industry.

I've been a BPM novice for my small company for many years. This book quickly normalized my approach and made me much more confident in setting out to BPM higher level functions rather than just workflows of specific processes / jobs.

This book is great for small business owners, department managers, and CRM / software developers. The latter because it's written as if the reader were an outside consultant. Developers can quickly wrap their minds around a clients needs by using a few basic exercises in this book.

Buy it.