Swim lane

A swim lane (to German: Lane ) is a in data flow diagrams used item for visual representation of sub-processes of a business process . A swimlane diagram (also called swimlane process representation ) consists of so-called pools and swimlanes ; a pool often represents organizations. Within a pool, the areas involved in a process such as people, groups, departments, systems or sub-processes are represented as "swimming lanes"; the activities to be carried out are placed in process boxes within these swim lanes. Swimlanes can be arranged both horizontally and vertically.

Swimlanes are used, among other things, for the analysis, modeling and optimization of business processes in BPMN diagrams. Swimlanes can help with the implementation of the change process from a function -oriented to a process-oriented organization .

In 2002, the Object Management Group (OMG) in America, an IT manufacturer consortium for the development of comprehensive IT standards , included the swimlane in BPMN 2.0 as an important structuring element.

History of the swimlane

A very early illustration of the swim lane can be found in the Management Bulletin on Process Charting of the “US Bureau of the Budget” from 1945. A “multi-column process chart” is described there as a more detailed variant of a work flow chart .

In December 1968, a swim lane representation in the GDR standard TGL 22452 was published under the name "Cybernetic block diagrams for modeling organizational systems, coordinate representation".

A visual representation of the swim lane was developed in 1987 by Hartmut F. Binner as part of his doctoral thesis on the requirement-based determination of data for production control systems at the Institute for Factory Systems under Hans-Peter Wiendahl at the TU Hannover . Back then, Binner used the term “event data time graph” instead of swimlane.

Based on this swimlane representation, Binner also presented the sycat process management tool as the first tool of its kind at the university booth in Hanover during CeBIT in 1988 and then continuously developed it further.

In 1990 Geary Rummler and Alan Brache published the book Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart . The authors expanded previously known workflow diagrams to include swim lanes, an additional lane at the top of the diagram ( top lane ) for the representation of customer interaction and one or more separate lanes under the actual swim lanes for interaction with external support processes (e.g. from Suppliers). Such visualizations were called "Rummler-Brache diagrams" in the 1990s.

Characteristics of this swim lane are the role-based process structure representations from an organizational point of view , which describe the process execution objectively - logically - chronologically in detail with their organizational and information interfaces between the participants. For this reason, the range of SYCAT tools was developed from organizational design requirements and not from IT requirements. This approach was not the case with many of the tools developed in the 1990s. Rather, these tool solutions such as B. in the result-oriented process chain display (EPC) the visualization at programming step level and thus clearly the IT perspective in focus. In the meantime, however, it is state of the art that the business processes shape the IT infrastructure and architecture and not, conversely, that the IT applications determine the business processes.

Holistic process design and visualization

This uniform and consistent swimlane process representation includes role-based all tasks and work processes with their rights and obligations in the company, there are management, performance and support processes

presented in their factual-temporal-logical dependency,
comprehensively defined through the mutual assignment of all business details (including functions, process steps, applications, documents / data, resources, interfaces, potentials and improvement measures),
by assigning their functions to functional areas, roles and positions, etc.
embedded in the company's organizational framework through clear and transparent delimitations (organizational interfaces, areas of validity, competencies, responsibilities).

A defined input and output as well as a number of process parameters can be precisely assigned in the database for each process function that is objectively, logically and temporally fixed via the swimlane , for example:

Events,
Costs / times,
Instructions,
Documents / data,
Employee,
Operating instructions,
Tasks,
Weak points,
Regulations,
Requirement profiles,
Activities,
Quantities / frequencies,
Key figures,
Quality standards or
Clusterings.

All process descriptions, process descriptions, quality and time parameters assigned to the respective process can then be called up or evaluated via a software-supported process tree structure. In this way, the model basis for systematic and structured organizational development is created in order to eliminate the weak points explained in the introduction. At the same time, all necessary documentation for the introduction of the quality management system or the EFQM self-assessment is provided.

The process consolidation and standardization carried out in this way offers, in addition to the standardization of the processes, an excellent basis for fulfilling the QM standard requirements mentioned below in DIN EN ISO 9001 .

As the following figure shows, these requirements are formulated as follows.

DIN EN ISO 9001: The organization must ensure that ...

The results of the organizational and process design in relation to the requirements shown in Figure 5 for each assessed process are made via a maturity level assessment, optionally one-dimensional according to the PDCA level of maturity or two-dimensional via the portfolio assessment .

Function-oriented organizational structure

The vertical, i.e. H. Function- oriented organizational units can not withstand the current dynamic change processes with globalization, price pressure, short product lifetimes and increasing customer requirements, the demands on a competitive organizational structure due to their Taylorist organizational structures as well as the distinctive division of labor and the resulting many interfaces with the associated specialization and the bureaucratisation that occurs . The necessary approach to change is a realignment of the entire corporate development and design along the value chain across organizational and system boundaries. The structural setup of a company must be based on the operational processes. In doing so, the focus of corporate activities is shifted from vertical departmental and divisional thinking to horizontal process thinking with the employee as co-thinker and center of business processes, combined with a high degree of freedom of design, responsibility and decision-making. Traditionally grown area and functional boundaries are broken down in favor of a continuous consideration of the processes with a focus on the customer.

Process-oriented organizational design and management concepts

The paradigm shift from sellers 'to buyers' markets due to the saturation of the market with the associated organizational restructuring has greatly promoted this development in the management of change (change management). A number of current concepts in Figure 2 relate to a change from previously function-oriented to process-oriented organizational structures with flat hierarchies, interface reduction, optimal vertical integration, team organization, zero-error production, overhead reduction, CIP and demand-driven production. The employees have a key role here because they act independently and customer-oriented in lean processes. In the meantime, all of the current management concepts shown in Figure 2 are process-oriented, i. H. the role-based swim lane display is the reference point for implementation.

Figure 2

The trigger for the lean management mentioned in Figure 2 was the publication of the study "The Machine that Changed the World" by Jim Womack, Daniel Jones, Daniel Roos, German translation by Wilfried Hof under the title: "The second revolution in the automotive industry" . There it was very convincingly worked out that the already known competitive disadvantages, such as high wage costs, low working hours, a high tax rate or high overhead costs, were not the trigger for the competition problems expected in Germany in the medium term, but rather that they were serious compared to the process-oriented Toyota production system There were disadvantages in terms of motivation, quality, use of resources, avoidance of errors and interdisciplinary cooperation. The lean management concept is based on the design of a lean, low-waste horizontal value chain.

In particular, the radical Business Process Management approach (BPM) based on this was formulated in its essential forms in 1993 by the two American economists Hammer / Champy. BPM is understood here as a fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of essential business processes. The result is improvements on the order of magnitude in today's decisive and measurable performance parameters in terms of costs, quality, service and time. In essence, it is about the merging of activities prescribed by management that were previously carried out separately at different locations with different managers in different departments. In contrast to this radical BPM, which is primarily aimed at a one-time, radical reorganization of processes, the Lean Management concept is more geared towards achieving long-term continuous process improvement (CIP) in the company. The lean management concept is sometimes criticized for the fact that the streamlining of company processes does not include a strategic realignment and thus includes "a strategic continuation as before". From today's perspective, however, the radical BPM approach has failed because it was too much at the expense of the employees.

The Total Quality Management (TQM) concept also has Japanese roots. The point here is that employees and managers in all areas of the company have a total (comprehensive) focus on quality and customers and implement them in their processes. This is also an essential part of the corporate culture. The comprehensive quality term refers to a comprehensive company quality, which is composed of management, employee, process and result quality and thus guarantees the success of the company. The restructuring of the company with the help of this quality and customer concept should essentially take place on the basis of participation and delegation. Similar to lean management, a gradual, continuous improvement in the sense of a bottom-up structure is aimed for.

Another thought model for coping with change is Warnecke's fractal factory, which he sketched in the early 1990s in analogy to natural systems. The fractal company is a dynamic organization that is composed of autonomous, self-similar, purposeful, dynamic structures, that is, the fractals. These fractals have free space for self-organization, act largely independently and actively participate in their creation, change and dissolution. Together with other fractals, they operate in the company under intensive communication according to the rules of competition and cooperation. In this way, the fractals acquire the ability to change from within. This means that fractal companies can not only reactively adapt to their environment, but also act proactively on their own.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) not only focuses on internal company process optimization, but also on the overall process design across all companies that are in the supply chain. A supply chain (German: "supply chain", "supply chain", "logistic chain" or "value chain") is a cross-company network of companies that produces specific economic goods for a defined target market. In these respective target markets, it is not vertically integrated individual manufacturers that compete, but complex structured value creation systems (supply chains), which are composed of systemically linked, but autonomously acting individual entrepreneurs, in order to gain competitive advantages. Examples are the supply chains of the automotive industry or the textile value chain. In the extreme, the supply chain can range from the extraction of raw materials to the recycling (sometimes also the disposal) of old products.

The inter-organizational division of labor between the independent companies involved defines the extent and structure of the supply chain. Due to the tendency to concentrate on core competencies (outsourcing, reduction of intra-organizational division of labor / vertical integration in the company), increasingly differentiated (i.e. more labor-sharing) supply chains are developing.

The Theory on Constraints (TCO) by Eliyahu M. Goldratt focuses on the bottleneck consideration of processes. The decisive parameters for process optimization are throughput, stocks and operating costs. The goal is to convert inventory into throughput - better known as sales - in order to increase profit. The throughput and thus also the profit depend on the slowest work step within the entire value chain d. H. the capacity bottleneck. In order to avoid intermediate stocks and thus further reduce throughput, the work pace at workplaces should be adjusted to that of the bottleneck machine. If this bottleneck is removed, the throughput and thus the profit increases. The bottleneck machines always represent the critical path within the product creation process. The aim is to achieve a harmonized workflow in which the individual work steps are fully coordinated in terms of capacity. H. are clocked. So it is not about improving the individual efficiency of expensive machines in the production process, but about the coordinated overall optimum of all machines in the overall process.

The balanced scorecard concept is a key figure system that is used for corporate and process controlling purposes and as a management tool throughout all hierarchical levels that controls and controls process activities, i.e. services. The balanced scorecard provides all those involved in each process level with management information so that the right business or process-related decisions can be made. The balanced scorecard is seen as a strategic key figure management system because it specifies a key figure system of interdependent objectives, network sizes and key figures that enable a permanent review process. The balanced scorecard is intended to map, measure and communicate all of the customer-oriented, employee-oriented, process-oriented and success-oriented factors that are important for the company's success. In this way, the current state of the company is mapped.

The Six Sigma concept, also mentioned, is essentially about activating great potential for savings by eliminating errors and risks in the process flow, and thus creating decisive competitive advantages for the company. The strength of Six Sigma lies in the fact that the Six Sigma objectives are systematically achieved with the help of an extensive collection of simple to complex quality improvement methods and segments. From a statistical point of view, this concept is a concrete mathematical parameter that measures the standard deviation (3.4 errors per 1 million processes or products). Every process has an expected outcome; H. an average. Every result has a certain spread or variable "". The aim of the Six Sigma concept is to reduce this spread to the specified limits. The involvement and personal commitment of senior management and executives is essential for the success of the Six Sigma application.

The last mentioned organizational learning concept has a pronounced evolutionary character. Here the change of and in the company is understood in the sense of the higher and further development carried out. The organization can actively change through new skills and behaviors. For this it is necessary that the individual experiences and the knowledge of the process implementation are collectivized in an organizational knowledge base with the swim lane as a reference point. The application of this collectivized knowledge in turn leads to individual learning processes for the individual participants, which increase organizational knowledge. The learning outcomes resulting from these collective core processes are stored in rules, which are then generally applied in all areas of the organization and thus demand organizational learning.

Even if the management concepts explained above are often unclear as to whether they are to be understood in the broader sense as management of change within the entire company or in the narrower sense only as short-term change projects, process management enables an on the basis of the analysis and models of the company-specific processes Solution tailored to individual cases. Otherwise, when the change concept is being implemented, there would be a great risk of imposing a highly generalized organizational structure on the company. This danger is all the greater because each of the concepts presented above claims to be self-contained and complete. Based on practical experience, two serious mistakes are to be avoided in all approaches. The lack of involvement of employees in change projects often leads to their failure, and information technology should not be the driver for process changes, as the IT industry is based on its products for certain IT test orders and not on the processes of its customers.

BPM framework

For this approach, which is now known as BPM, which means “business process management strategy”, there has been a BPM framework as a level model for holistic organizational development and design for over 25 years. Figure 3 shows this framework, originally referred to as the CIM-house framework. It sets the three classic organizational design components: "Organization, people, technology" in the form of a house in a logical design context.

The lowest level of the framework, i.e. H. The foundation, decoupled from day-to-day business, refers to the continuous derivation of company-specific strategies and company goals in the form of cause-effect chains in the organizational level model, as well as the implementation of a process organization by specifying a company-specific process model consisting of "management and management processes, upstream support processes, core processes and downstream support processes ”, that is, the design of the organizational level. It is visualized via the SYCAT swim lane.

The second level based on this relates in day-to-day business to the creation of products or services from a business point of view within the value chain analyzed, optimized and documented with SYCAT, also known as the end-to-end process. Here, the needs-based resources must be provided and optimally coordinated for the product or service to be created in order to efficiently and effectively meet customer requirements. The decisive factor is the qualified and motivated employees who carry out the tasks with personal responsibility.

For this, it is necessary in the third level of the framework to provide IT architectures and structures that meet the requirements. In level four, employees are involved across all three levels mentioned. They systematically contribute their knowledge to the procedural and description models developed by Professor Binner, are qualified at the same time and in this way meet the five management targets set at the top level. The achievement of objectives is then checked consistently across all levels, for example with the help of the EFQM model.

Systematic implementation of the process-oriented approach

All current standards and regulations for integrated management systems such as B. quality, environmental, sustainability, health management and the like a. provide a process-oriented introductory approach. According to the requirements of DIN EN ISO 9001, this process-oriented approach is intended to promote a uniform description of processes and the use of process-related terminology, as well as an understanding of the process-oriented concept. This includes in detail:

Recognition of the necessary processes for an effective implementation of the QM system
Understand the interaction between these processes
Document the processes as necessary to ensure their effective execution and control.

The rationale for the process-oriented view that has been in force since 2000 when DIN EN ISO 9001 was introduced is as follows:

All organizations produce results (products) that are supposed to satisfy customers. The ISO 9001 series of standards on quality management systems can help organizations achieve this goal with the help of features that meet the needs and expectations of customers. These needs and expectations are more precisely expressed in product specifications and collectively referred to as customer requirements. Customer requirements can be specified by the customer through a contract or specified by the organization itself. In both cases, the customer ultimately decides about the acceptability of the product. As customer needs and expectations change, organizations are encouraged to continually improve their products and processes. When approaching a quality management system, organizations are asked to analyze customer requirements, define those processes that deliver a product that is acceptable to customers, and keep these processes under control. A quality management system can form the framework for continuous improvement to meet customer requirements. Such an approach enables the organization to reduce the risk of customer dissatisfaction. It gives the organization and customers confidence in their ability to consistently deliver products that meet requirements.

The goals of process-oriented quality management are:

Understanding and fulfilling the requirements of customers or interested parties
To look at the processes from the point of view of added value
Achieve effective results as well
To continuously improve the processes on the basis of objective measurements.

However, in order to implement these objectives, there should be a functioning corporate process management as a meta system or framework that provides a regulatory framework. Furthermore, the analysis of the processes should provide the framework and the content when determining the required amount of documentation for a QM system. It should therefore not be the documentation that drives the process analysis, but, conversely, the process efficiency and effectiveness.

The purpose of the process-oriented approach is to improve the profitability of a company in achieving the set goals. According to these instructions, the advantages of the process-oriented approach are for example:

Integration and alignment of processes to enable the achievement of planned results
Ability to focus efforts on the effectiveness of the processes
Giving customers or other interested parties confidence in the company's continued performance
Transparency of the work processes within the company
Lower costs and shorter lead times through the effective use of resources
Improved, consistent, and predictable results
Create opportunities for targeted and prioritized initiatives for improvement
Encouraging people's commitment and clarifying their responsibilities.

The process-oriented introductory approach is not only reduced to the introduction of QM systems, but now applies without restriction to all other management systems that - as management systems - have to meet legal, social, economic, ecological or norm-specific specifications. Due to the process-oriented reference base, there are very large synergy effects in the implementation of integrated management systems.

As stated above, the process-oriented approach is a convincing concept for organizing, managing and directing different management systems so that activities for the customer and other interested parties are legally secure, norm-compliant and value-adding. It also improves the control of the interfaces in the process.

The implementation of this process-oriented approach is detailed in Figure 4 in 5 main steps and linked via the MITO model with its 5 model segments “Management, input, transformation, output and management” as a regulatory and structural framework. A company is thus able to implement the requirements outlined above from different management perspectives and to improve them sustainably.

The 5 steps described for realizing the process-oriented approach can be applied to any type of process.

Dissemination in practice

Today the swimlane display is successfully used in almost all BPM tools available on the market in over 100 industries. It is also used in health management and public administration in various federal states and in municipalities. Since then, Swimlane has established itself worldwide as the process visualization and modeling standard. The new information technologies with cloud computing , enterprise mobility, Industry 4.0 , big data and social business support this development, as the IT service provider is now also focusing on the horizontal value chain in digitization.

literature

Hartmut F. Binner: Handbook of the process-oriented work organization, REFA reference book series "Unternehmensentwicklung". 4th edition. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-446-42641-2 .

Hartmut F. Binner: Process Management from A to Z. Hanser, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-446-42303-9 .

Hartmut F. Binner: Pragmatic Knowledge Management - Systematic Increase in Intellectual Capital. (REFA reference book series "Unternehmensentwicklung"). Hanser, Munich / Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-446-41377-1 .

Hartmut F. Binner: Management Guide "On the way to top performance". Hanser, Munich / Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-446-40481-3 .

Hartmut F. Binner: Process-oriented TQM implementation. (Series: Organizational Management and Factory Automation. 3). 2., verb. and current edition. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-446-21852-1 .

Hartmut F. Binner: Integrated organization and process management. (REFA reference book series corporate development). Hanser, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-446-19174-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Multi-column process chart (PDF) Management Bulletin on Process Charting. US Bureau of the Budget, 1945.
↑ TGL 22452 - Cybernetic block diagrams for modeling organizational systems, coordinate representation , a GDR variant of the swimlane representation on swimlane.info.
↑ Hartmut F. Binner: Requirements-based data determination for production control systems . (PDF) Dissertation. Hanover, 1987.
↑ Rummler-Brache swimlane diagram (PDF) Obituary for Geary A. Rummler, 2008.

[1] Multi-column process chart (PDF) Management Bulletin on Process Charting. US Bureau of the Budget, 1945.

[2] TGL 22452 - Cybernetic block diagrams for modeling organizational systems, coordinate representation , a GDR variant of the swimlane representation on swimlane.info.

[3] Hartmut F. Binner: Requirements-based data determination for production control systems . (PDF) Dissertation. Hanover, 1987.

[4] Rummler-Brache swimlane diagram (PDF) Obituary for Geary A. Rummler, 2008.