Customizing and Standardizing the Visio BPM Environment

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The visibility of the Order Fill process improvement project led to greater interest in Visio as a BPM tool in other parts of the company. Unfortunately, different working groups within the company used different methods to create process diagram and to present data using Visio 2007. This led to inconsistent formats for diagrams and duplicated efforts to create Data Graphics, report templates, and custom shapes for diagrams. Northwind’s management sought to standardize the way Visio documents were created, and turned to the original COE team for guidance.

The COE team discovered that a large amount of the effort to build their original process diagrams could be captured and stored within the Visio environment itself, giving future process improvement teams a head start when they began preparing their own Visio documents.

The COE team began by creating a custom stencil of diagram shapes exclusively for Northwind’s processes analysis and process monitoring tasks. The COE team had invested hours in determining which process data metrics to capture using the Shape Data feature in Visio. They customized the Process shape—part of the Basic Flow Chart Shapes stencil—to include data inputs for the observations they collected. A team member added this shape to the Northwind stencil by simply dragging the shape from the completed Order Fill diagram onto the stencil.

Next, the COE team created a custom process analysis template, called "Northwind BPA Template", from the original Order Fill process Visio document. The template contained all of the distinct formatting the team had used in the original Order Fill process improvement project. When a new drawing was created from the template, the Northwind stencil and all of the Data Graphics associated with the stencil shapes were automatically loaded.

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