Before You Automate, Know What You’re Automating!

We’re living in an age where businesses want digital transformation YESTERDAY —but few can sit down and sketch their process flow without looking like they’ve seen a ghost.

And here’s the inconvenient truth:If you can’t map it, you probably shouldn’t automate it.

🗺️ Process Mapping — The Underrated Hero of Automation

Before your shiny AI assistant takes over, it pays to understand what’s actually going on.You can go old-school — grab a pen and paper and sketch your flow. Works perfectly fine.

But these days we have slightly fancier toys:

• From MS Visio – like Excel for shapes

• Through Miro, Lucidchart or Canva – perfect for people who like collaboration and pretty colours.

• Till ARIS – the Rolls-Royce of process tools (with the price tag to match).

  
  

And now even AI tools are joining the fun — suggesting optimisations, detecting loops, and occasionally asking existential questions about why we approve invoices three times.

🧩 The Secret Ingredient: The User of the Process Map

A map is only useful if someone can actually read it.So before you unleash your inner Picasso of flowcharts, think about:

• Who’s reading it?  C-suite? Operations? IT?

• How detailed should it be? No, a 75-step swimlane diagram won’t make you look clever.

• Is it readable?  Nobody — and I mean nobody — wants to stare at a spaghetti graph of tangled arrows.

  
  

Make it clear. Make it usable. Make it tell a story.

At Proud Consul, we help businesses turn process chaos into clarity — preparing automation-ready workflows that actually make sense to humans and machines.

Because even the best AI can’t fix a broken process. 😉

🎯 Over to You

What’s your favourite tool for process mapping ?

How detailed do you go before automation begins?