Understanding data and workflow

- [Presenter] Every organization is different. And then interestingly enough, the same. There is the way that the work flows through the organization and the data that's captured around that flow. Before I was an entrepreneur, when I was building up my industry experience and skills, I worked in a highly regulated industry and it was intense. And my first two weeks of work, I did nothing but read policy and procedure manuals, full of workflow diagrams. It was an amazing experience because it changed the way I looked at every process and it forced me to diagram out how the workflows in every place I would eventually go. In every situation I always ask, is there a policy around this process? And do you have any procedural documentation? And do you happen to have a workflow? You may find that the procedure either does not exist in writing or it's in bits and pieces. No matter whether they have a workflow diagram or not, I always start my own diagram so I can intelligently figure out where data is captured in any part of the process and can document where to potentially find it. Let me walk you through a simple process. Let's use a sales example because it gives us a lot of opportunity to look at the different parts of a process. A sale is created, a product is ordered, a product is delivered and accounting occurs. This sounds so simple, right? Let's take a look at each of those four statements and work out the timing and the data. I'm using a swim lane diagram for this demonstration but understand there are many types of workflow diagrams. Let's look at the point that a sales lead comes in. This is the beginning point of this process. It then moves to determine if a customer is new or not and if they are, they're added to the Customer Relationship Management software or CRM. Do you see the data. In reality, the data came in way before then. How do we get the sales lead? Is that captured somewhere like our website or inside something form? Is it from an online store? Was it a cold call? Okay, obviously we're going to look at the CRM pace to see if we can identify if the customer exists already or not. Basically, we're trying to determine if we know about them. Once we have that taken care of, we then move to the order being created. For this example, we don't care what widget or service people are buying. Ultimately, it's the product of this organization. The sales team then works with the customer and at some point the order is created and it becomes a sales order. Again, do you see the data? You might say yes, the sales order data but let me assure you it's really in the order creation that it begins. I would ask questions like where is the data the salespeople use to show the options to the customer? Is that the same system that generates the sales order or is that in a different system? At some point the sales order then passes to the production team. It passes to the production team for approval. The production team then will determine if this is something that can actually be approved based on the customer's requirements. The question on the data here is how do we send sales orders to production? Is it in a system? Is it a spreadsheet? Is it through an email with a PDF attachment and then where is the data that holds the actual approval or the lack of approval? Is it the same system that holds the sales order? Now for time say we're going to move through the approved process which then goes back to sales to let them know that the sale has been approved and then sales then routes it to accounting to create an actual invoice in the accounting system, even more data. And that data is likely siloed because accounting software is super specialized and shows a whole other level of organizational reporting and requirements, it's typically sensitive. Then we go back to the sales team who then submits the invoice to the customer. The customer then pays and routes it to accounting. In this example, only when the customer pays does it get routed from accounting to production. It's then routed to shipping, it's then routed directly to the customer and upon delivery, the sales kicks back in for the close out of the process. Now that we've walked through the entire process and captured all the different places data might be, we can then look and research questions like, how long does it take us to close out a customer from the point that they paid to the point that the closeout begins. You now have a process to follow and a flow. If you're trying to determine timing between production to shipping. Again, you may have identified the systems, you can then determine what happens between production and shipping. If you're tasked to determine how many new customers versus existing customers are making orders each month and the impacts to production, you now have a path to follow. I think it's important to know that whether the processes are documented or the workflow diagrams exist that every organization has a process, good, bad or indifferent. And if you don't have something formal to follow, you should at least rough sketch the work. So you can see the workflow. Data is living and again, it occurs at points in time and through out a process.