A process inventory exercise quickly generates a list of business processes (or process areas) that can be categorized by business unit, size, business impact, risk, and pain. In a brief interview, you gather enough details for each process to map it to the value chain and help prioritize processes for further assessment, discovery, and analysis. Details include:

• Process owner
• Short description (3 - 5 sentences)
• Size and complexity
• Risk
• Pain

The term inventory represents the goods and materials held by a business, often made available for sale. An inventory is a list compiled for a specific purpose. It is in this sense that one builds an inventory of business processes in the organization. It is not necessary to include every business process to the inventory. List only those business processes that are relevant to the business objectives today. The tools that you use to keep a process inventory should make it easy to organize and find new and common processes, to share and collaborate on processes, and to control who has access to view or change processes.

Key reasons for maintaining a process inventory are to:

• Organize and easily find business processes.
• Share and collaborate on business processes.
• Control access to viewing or changing business processes.

It is essential to identify processes and where they fit in the overall landscape of processes in the enterprise. There are dozens of industry-specific categorical hierarchies of business processes, using them can help accelerate process inventory. One example is the insurance industry standard ACORD ACORD capability model that contains a list of named processes common to insurance organizations.

Blueworks Live is an enterprise-class process modeling tool available as a service (SAAS). Blueworks Live is the fastest way to start a process inventory and keep it current through collaborative participation across the enterprise. Blueworks Live can be found at the following address: blueworkslive.com

The first thing to do in Blueworks Live is create a space in which you define business processes. A space could represent a narrow process area or an entire department of our business. It should be described in a few sentences. A few goals should be created to characterize the reasons for wanting to document the processes for this part of the business.

The figure shows the start screen of process inventory.