Earlier this month, SalesForce.com announced a new feature for their product suite. You can now visually design processes for your business.

A press release offers some highlights:

“What the process manager does is it lets our customers automate these business processes by simply drawing that process just as you’d draw a process on a white board,” said Ariel Kelman, vice president of marketing for Force.com at Salesforce.com.  ”Our cloud computing platform will instantly run that process in the cloud.”

“Someone who doesn’t know how to write code can build sophisticated business applications,” through Visual Process Manager, which actually generates metadata.

That’s a pretty tall order, and customers should be aware that there’s far more to designing business processes than just doodling a whiteboard. As The Methodology Blog has noted before, business process modeling can be aided by software, but most companies need to adopt a process-centric perspective before diving into this solution.

However, SalesForce should be heralded for taking this step. Existing customers of their award-winning products will undoubtedly be introduced to visual process design, paving the way for companies to focus more on developing intelligent workflows based on diagrams.

In either case, however, your organization can likely benefit from learning how to design visual workflows. The whiteboard is the place to start. For more, check out Slaughter Development’s Business Process Modeling offering. We’d love to help you improve productivity and satisfaction at work.

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