Process Mapping & Why It’s Cool

While process mapping might seem a bit nerdy and elementary, it is an essential tool that can help you and your brewery grow! At the end of the day, process mapping provides visual insights into the daily activities executed at the brewery. Some of the benefits of process mapping include enabling an organization to make faster decisions, identify problems/opportunities, track performance, facilitate change management, and align on strategic goals across the organization.

In brewing, mapping out operations alone can make a big impact on the overall business. Once process flows of the brewing, packaging and quality operations are mapped, team leaders can review the current state of operations from start to finish. This comprehensive review can help identify ways to eliminate process loss, streamline or standardize work (who collects sample, and when?), determine critical measurement points, reduce process times, establish and track key process indicators, and recognize success points to be celebrated.

There are many different mapping methods to choose from including: flowcharts, block flow diagrams, process flow diagrams, swim lane diagrams, root cause analysis, 6Sigma, lean, Kaizen, PDCA and more. Each department might want to apply a different mapping method to ensure they are capturing the nuances of their unique work-flows.

Is it worth the effort to you and your team to build and maintain process maps? I firmly believe the answer is yes! At the end of the day the saying holds true, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure.”

If you have already established process maps, when is the last time you reviewed or used them to help prioritize projects and improvements? If you don’t have process maps, what’s holding you back from creating them? If it is driven by time and resource constraints this is a great reason to call a brewery consultant.

I have worked at some of the larger craft breweries in the industry and have seen the benefit first hand of having great process maps established. I have also been able to participate in building them for new processes that needed to be established. I am a beer nerd - and this is the kind of thing that I get so excited to do, if this sounds like something you and your brewery might benefit from, drop me a line and let’s get mapping!