Process Mapping Examples and Best Practices in Different Industries

Anna Roebuck at Netcall explores best practices and share real-world process mapping examples across industries technology can help you work smarter.

Business process mapping helps you visualise how work gets done and following process mapping best practices ensures those maps drive real improvement.

Process mapping gives organisations a way to document workflows so teams can spot inefficiencies, improve operations and drive better outcomes. Process mapping is essential for clarity, consistency and continuous improvement.

In this article, we’ll answer the following questions for you:

• Business process mapping best practices
• Business process mapping examples
• Common process mapping mistakes to avoid
• Process mapping in different industries:
  • Healthcare
  • Insurance
  • Finance
  • Retail and consumer goods
  • Local Government
  • Housing

Business Process Mapping Best Practices

Define Clear Objectives

Start with a purpose. What do you want to achieve by mapping this process? Whether it’s improving efficiency, reducing errors or onboarding faster, having clear goals helps guide the mapping and measure success.

Clearly Define the Beginning and End

Every process has a start and finish. Be specific. For example, a recruitment process might begin with a job requisition and end with a signed contract. This clarity helps avoid scope creep and keeps your map focused from the very start of your project.

Involve the Right Stakeholders

Make sure you include the people who actually do the work. Their insights are vital. They’ll be able to feedback and spot missing steps, flag bottlenecks and help build a map that reflects reality, not assumptions. Plus, they’ll begin to understand what other people in the team are doing as well.

Keep Maps Simple and Clear

Don’t overcomplicate things. Focus on key steps at first. A clean, readable map means people can understand easily the process.

Choose a software that will incorporate all the little details you need to include without overcomplicating the map. Simplicity drives engagement and should drive your process mapping best practices.

Use the Right Tools

Choose software that suits your needs. From basic flowcharts to advanced solutions, the right platform makes mapping easier.

Ensure that you are consistent and use a standard methodology to avoid confusion.

Validate and Update Regularly

Tie your process maps to performance metrics. This helps teams see the impact of improvements and track progress over time.

Embedding process mapping best practices in your organisation means that process improvement will be recognised for the great value it can bring to every team

Additional tip: Link maps to KPIs

Choose software that suits your needs. From basic flowcharts to advanced solutions, the right platform makes mapping easier.

Ensure that you are consistent and use a standard methodology to avoid confusion. Take the time to research the different types of process maps you could use.

Business Process Mapping Examples

There are many different types of business process mapping examples that can be used to streamline operations. Here are just a few:

Order-to-Cash

Teams can map every step of the process from order placement to payment collection. This helps us spot delays and improve cash flow.

You can consider who is responsible for which step and identify areas of duplication.

Customer Onboarding

Our onboarding map shows how new customers move from signup to first use. It highlights handovers and automates key steps.

Again, a smooth customer onboarding process can mean the difference to a customer who stays or a customer who churns.

Recruitment Process

Recruitment is an area where process is key from identifying the right candidate to ensuring your key stakeholders are happy. Healthy processes reduce the time to hire and maintains your organisation’s reputation.

Common Process Mapping Mistakes to Avoid

There are so many clear benefits of process mapping it’s difficult to really see any disadvantages to taking the time to capture your processes.

But, as is true with all things, if it’s not done correctly, mapping processes can be a wasted exercise. Here are some common process mapping mistakes to avoid:

Underestimating The Investment

Doing process discovery the right way the first time, requires investment, in the form of time, cost and in software and experts.

That can be hard for any organisation to understand. This is especially true if they haven’t really taken the time to understand the benefits.

Such an investment is wasted if the process isn’t captured properly and that also typically requires a lot of additional time from employees, which takes them away from their daily tasks.

Everything will have to slow down for a bit when organisations begin to consider and map out their processes, which will impact revenue.

Although it might be a costly exercise for a short time, if done correctly, the money will be made back quickly and efficiently.

Expecting Unrealistic Results

A lot of success and problem-solving can be attributed to process mapping. Making sure the organisation understands what you can and cannot do, is really important from the very beginning. Otherwise, you will be frustrated with your results.

You need to map out your processes and then realistically understand how making changes will impact your business over time.

Expecting to make lots of revenue simply because you fixed one problem is not how process mapping will best help you.

You need to constantly troubleshoot the process and define goals to aim for, to truly practice continuous process improvement correctly. And to get the results that you are after.

Making Maps Too Complex

Business processes can be really complicated to display. If they aren’t mapped in a simple way, they can be overwhelming and difficult to read, meaning your employees do not engage with them.

If they are on paper, it’s easy to lose or forget what was said or not properly understand the handwriting. And it doesn’t work for remote working.

Fortunately, quality, process map focused software exists to help keep things simple and streamlined, so that everyone can read and follow along with any process map. They will no longer be a mess of arrows and mysterious shapes.

Letting Maps Go Stale

You can spend a lot of time mapping a process. You feel great after a workshop, you create a beautiful process map… And then you forget about it for a year or two.

Once you finally dust it off, it’s way out of date. It’s vital to ensure that you continue to use your process map after the workshop, not just leave it in a filing cabinet to check in on every few months. Using software that is easy to update and share with your colleagues will make that ten times easier.

And if the software has a built-in process review, that helps to remind you to constantly check up on your process maps and compare them to how it’s working on the ground.

The more accurate your process maps are, the better you are at making the changes to truly impact your goals.

Make Sure Your Mapping Isn’t Time Wasted

Make sure that you have the correct tools in place beforehand and your process mapping will go smoothly.

While you do need to take your time to get it done, it should not be negatively impacting you to do so. Process mapping should be clearly explained and have demonstrable goals that everyone can follow along to help understand why the time is being taken to do it.

Sometimes, the time it takes to map out a process can be blamed for stopping the whole project or initiative.

It’s really important to make sure that the method of capturing your process is effective. Can you do it in the workshop or do you have to waste valuable hours later entering all the information? Are people getting frustrated by trying to access information that isn’t accessible to all?

Process Mapping in Different Industries

Process mapping isn’t just for operations teams. It’s used across industries to drive better outcomes.

Healthcare

Process mapping in healthcare helps NHS teams see the full picture. It shows how tasks flow, where delays happen and what causes frustration for staff and patients.

By visualising each step, teams can spot inefficiencies and make targeted improvements. It’s a key part of quality improvement because it brings clarity, encourages collaboration and supports better decision-making.

When frontline staff lead the mapping, it builds ownership and drives change. In a pressured system like the NHS, process mapping helps teams work smarter, not harder – delivering better care with the resources they already have.

Insurance

Process mapping helps insurers tackle complexity by making operations visible. It reveals inefficiencies, bottlenecks and gaps in customer journeys.

With this clarity, teams can redesign processes to be faster, simpler and more customer friendly. It also supports compliance by ensuring consistency and transparency.

In a sector facing rising costs and high customer expectations, process mapping empowers teams to streamline services, reduce friction and deliver better outcomes – without overhauling entire systems.

Finance

Financial services teams are under pressure to deliver more with less. But processes that aren’t working slow everything down – from onboarding and servicing to compliance and claims.

Process improvement helps you fix what’s not working. You’ll spot delays, remove friction and redesign journeys that work better for customers and teams.

It’s not about big system changes. It’s about making what you already have work smarter. Finance teams can use mapping to optimise procure-to-pay and order-to-cash cycles for example.

Retail and Consumer Goods

Process mapping helps retail and consumer goods industry fix broken journeys. It shows how tasks flow, where delays happen and what frustrates customers.

With this clarity, you can automate manual processes across inventory, fulfilment, finance and customer service. You can optimise your customer journeys across every channel. Plus, you can adapt fast to change whilst staying consistent.

Local Government

Process mapping helps councils fix broken services and meet rising demand. It shows how requests move across departments, where delays happen and what causes frustration for citizens. You’ll spot duplication, gaps and missed handoffs.

That means you can redesign services to be faster, clearer and easier to deliver. It also helps teams work better together.

With tight budgets and stretched resources, process mapping lets you improve outcomes – without needing new systems or extra headcount.

Housing

Process improvement helps housing teams tackle key issues like missed repairs, slow void turnarounds and poor communication. It shows how requests move between teams, where delays happen and what frustrates tenants.

With this insight, you can redesign services to be faster, clearer and more joined-up. It helps you deliver better outcomes, reduce costs and meet regulatory demands

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Netcall – View the Original Article

For more information about Netcall - visit the Netcall Website

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: Netcall
Reviewed by: Rachael Trickey