Your Process Maps Will Die After Go-Live, Unless You Do This

The Problem with Project-Based Process Mapping

In The Most Overlooked Secret to a Successful ERP Implementation: Business Process Management and From Chaos to Clarity: A Practical Guide to BPMN 2.0 for Your Dynamics 365 Project of this series, we made the case for process-centric implementations and learned the practical basics of BPMN 2.0. We have the 'why' and the 'how' of creating process maps. Now, we need to talk about a difficult truth.

Most of the process documentation created during an ERP project is dead on arrival.

I've walked into countless companies to start a new software implementation. The first question is always, "Can we see your business process documentation?" The answer is almost always a variation of, "We don't really have any."

Departments work in silos. The real way work gets done is a mystery, locked away in the heads of a few key people. In large organizations, you find surprises around every corner. This lack of a shared understanding makes implementing new software incredibly painful and risky.

But even when a company has done the work, it's often useless. And that leads me to a story from early in my career.

The Beautiful Binders Nobody Used

I was starting a new Dynamics AX project. The client, a massive enterprise, proudly told us that one of the Big 4 consulting firms had just spent a year on a dedicated project to document and visualize all of their business processes. My first thought was, amazing. This is the dream scenario.

And the output was beautiful. We had binders full of detailed diagrams and insightful analysis. It was a perfect snapshot of the company at that moment in time.

But here's the catch: it was a snapshot. It was treated as a one-time expense, a prerequisite for the ERP project. Nobody was assigned to maintain it. Nobody owned it. The moment their project ended, the documentation began to rot. Within a year, it was already dangerously out of date. It was an expensive artifact, not a living management tool.

This is the choice every organization faces. You will have to pay to document your processes for a major implementation. The question is: will it be a sunk cost, or will it be the start of a long-term, value-adding investment?

Towards a Sustainable BPM Strategy

If you want to build something that lasts, you have to stop thinking about process mapping as a project task. You need to start building a sustainable BPM culture. It's a shift from a one-time event to a continuous discipline.

But how? Let me tell you another story.

I worked with a manufacturing company in the Black Forest of Germany. They weren't a tech company, but their approach to process documentation was one of the most effective I've ever seen. They didn't have a flashy BPM Center of Excellence. Instead, they embedded the responsibility within their Quality Management department.

It was part of their culture of Kaizen business processes. Kaizen, if you're not familiar, is a Japanese philosophy of continuous process improvement. This German company had a strong affiliation with the Kaizen Institute Germany and took the philosophy seriously. They had a person whose job included managing Kaizen activities and the entire business process catalog.

Their system was simple but powerful:

Centralized Management: The process catalog management was a core function of the QM team.
Clear Ownership: The catalog visualized all quality management processes and, crucially, assigned clear responsibilities and process ownership across the organization.
Accessible Information: For every process, there was a dedicated folder (a bit old-school, but it worked) containing work instructions, related ISO norms, and training materials.

The key lesson wasn't about their specific tools. It was about their business process management strategy. They understood that knowing your process is a fundamental part of quality.

The Power of Governance and Feedback

What made this German company's approach truly successful was their BPM governance model. The QM team's job wasn't just to draw maps; it was to ensure the maps reflected reality and helped the business improve.

They held regular process review meetings. These weren't stuffy corporate exercises. They brought together the official process owners with the people actually doing the work on the production floor. The feedback from employees was invaluable. They would identify small changes that led to huge wins in efficiency and massive reductions in production errors—improvements we, as consultants, could never have imagined on our own.

This feedback loop is the engine of sustainable BPM. It keeps the documentation alive, relevant, and valuable. It steadily improves the organizational process maturity over time.

Your First Steps to a BPM Implementation Strategy

So, how can you apply these lessons? You don't need a multi-million dollar consulting engagement to get started.

You need to make a strategic choice to turn process mapping from a project cost into a business asset. The foundation of a good BPM implementation strategy is ownership.

Appoint a Leader: Find one person in your organization who is responsible for the methodology. This person defines the standards, chooses the tools, and champions the importance of process management.
Build a Virtual Team: Create a BPM team structure built on distributed ownership. This leader works with managers and subject matter experts across the business who take partial ownership of their respective areas in the process catalog.

This isn't about creating a new department. It's about embedding process thinking into the fabric of your organization. It's the only way to ensure the clarity you gain during your ERP project continues to deliver value for years to come.

In A Practical D365 Implementation Methodology: The Process-First Approach, we'll bring everything together and show you how to use these process principles to run your entire Dynamics 365 implementation from planning to testing.