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Process charts provide a baseline for process improvement and are excellent training tools if they include enough detail to support common sense decisions.  The Graham process charting methodology was initially developed over a half century ago to help people analyze business processes.  Graham charts clearly identify the documents in a process… the value-added points where data is manipulated…the reports that are generated and the people involved.  With this information at hand, current processes can be analyzed in detail.   Graham charts are a solid tool for incremental change and a powerful enhancement to major change efforts – helping improvement teams ensure that real requirements are built into new processes and unnecessary data, flow, work… is kept out.

In 1944, Ben S Graham Sr. attended Allen Mogensen’s Work Simplification Conference in Lake Placid New York.  The workshop was an intensive 6-week program that immersed delegates in the philosophy and tools of work simplification.  As the only delegate whose background was not in manufacturing, Graham took the work simplification tools and methods back to his employer, The Standard Register Company, and proceeded to adapt them to the study of information processes.

Work simplification is defined as the organized application of common sense.  It is a blend of technique and teamwork.  The organization is provided by a solid toolset with rigid methodology.  The common sense is provided by teams of people who do the work.  Work simplification puts the toolset into the hands of the people who are most knowledgeable about the work, thereby tapping into the organization’s most valuable resource – the first-hand experience of its people.  Work simplification provides us with the tools and methods to study and understand our business processes.

Simply talking about processes isn’t understanding them.  Looking at them from 10,000 feet isn’t going to cut it -- If we read through procedures and talk to the managers and supervisors about the processes, we are gaining an understanding that is at least one step from reality.  If we document processes using this information, the documentation will not reflect reality.  To understand our processes, we need two things…the right information and a good tool for capturing and displaying process detail.

The right information is in the heads of the PEOPLE WHO DO THE WORK - the people who, day in and day out, are living the process that you want to document.  It is the accumulated experience specific to the process that you want to chart. These people know WHAT HAPPENS in their part of the process better than anyone else because it is what they do.  They know what appears to make sense in the process and what appears to be nonsense in the process.  They know how to make their piece of the process work and how to get around it when it doesn’t work. 

The right tool should provide clarity without being overly simplistic.  It should provide detail without clutter.  It should be easy to use and easy to understand.  There are a lot of flowcharting tools that provide symbol sets.  But if the symbols are not wrapped in a methodology, then the charter has to invent one.  (Collecting the data, stringing the symbols together, handling rework…unusual situations…)  Fortunately, the work simplification charting method has made this easy with a small, well thought out symbol set and methodology that provides elegant structure to the ominous task of process charting.  The fact that the work simplification symbol set was adopted as the ANSI and ASME standards for Process Charting fifty years ago is testimony to its fundamental simplicity.  It has flowed through a half century of new technologies and constantly changing processes with the grace of an alphabet…because it is fundamental.  It is basic.  It gets to the root of our processes.  It speaks the language of process.

By Ben B Graham
President
The Ben Graham Corporation