In this tutorial, you will learn how to build back-office diagram from scratch as a complement to the already documented e-commerce shopping process flow diagram using Microsoft Visio. And show you how they all connect and interrelate together. Also, you will see couple of cool features like adding additional connection points on the shapes and how to increase size of the text for the decision-making box.

A flowchart or swimlane diagram is a type of diagram that delineates who does what in a process. Microsoft Visio is an application to create diagrams. This is helpful in business environment when you need to describe process to a group of people, define key tasks and decision points.

Microsoft Visio is software for drawing diagrams. These include floor plans, electrical diagrams, flowcharts, org charts, building plans, floor plans, data flow diagrams, process flow diagrams, business process modeling, swim lane diagrams, 3D maps, and many more.

From flow charts to floor plans to swim lane diagrams to networking diagrams and organizational charts: Visio can handle it all. In this tutorial we will look at the features of Visio and will cover creation of Visio diagrams step by step

If appropriate for your needs, Visio can produce extremely helpful, slick, useful diagrams of all types, and these can provide the professional look you want for presentations, reports, audits, building plans, floor plans, documentation, and modeling better ways to do things. Visio includes a big library of shapes/symbols used in dozens of diagram types. These symbols represent specialized pieces of diagrams such as process flow diagrams, business process modeling, data flow diagrams, and many more. These are used widely in various fields for various purposes.

In today’s organizations with multiple work groups or departments, this diagramming can help in various ways:

It can help to ensure that the right hand knows what the left is doing in an organization. Swimlane Diagrams, and swimlanes used in other diagram types, highlight which process steps or sub-processes are assigned to a particular actor in the organization.

By spelling this out in a diagram, you can highlight redundancies between different lanes and identify bottlenecks, waste and other inefficiencies. This sometimes reveals duplicative or unnecessary steps in a process, such as different departments performing the same task. It also can highlight process delays or capacity constraints within a particular swimlane so that they can be addressed and resolved. This can increase performance and quality and reduce unnecessary work and costs.

You can use a second Swimlane Diagram to model a better way to structure the process or to account for changing circumstances, such as staffing changes or technology changes.

Like other diagrams, Swimlane Diagrams can communicate in clearer terms than a narrative description would.

Swimlane Diagrams can be formalized as a way to integrate processes between teams or departments, resulting in cleaner processes on an ongoing basis.