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Hi

I’m trying to document into Visio the business and IT processes of the company and struggling. Is there any software that you can build a flowchart based on Q and A through a wizard? I used something a while ago and cant seem to find it again. Was extremely quick with a PDF report at the end. You could then go in and manually tweak to initially document the flow and use to help alter business flow with the board.

14 Spice ups
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  • Why do you want to use MS Visio for such a purpose?

Yes, it may be used for such a purpose and is definitely not the worst option. But is does not provide any assistance for your purpose. It is usually already better than pure (prose) text or a spreadsheet, or no documentation at all.

I don’t know but would expect that there are several for different purposes and different constraints with some overlap and probably overlapping also with your task.

So it confirms my expectation when you’ve seen such a solution or tool. I don’t know what you have seen and how you were searching to find it again.
When I read your topic title, I associate BPMN with your idea. BPMN is a standard for business process model and notation . Please have a look also at its MIWG (Model Interchange Working Group) and their repository at Github . Perhaps you find your tool in this referenced list of tested tools for model interchange. If not, those tools might be much more powerful than what you may have already seen and definitely worth a deeper look in order to prevent vendor lock-in and allow more use cases resp. re-use.

Yes. But a PDF is much more limited than such models in BPMN. Models seem to me better suited for discussion and working with the board, especially if the board consists of well trained young to mid-aged people with corresponding experience. Most PDF are limited to two dimensions whereas a model may have many more dimensions allowing to see impacts of modifications on other aspects not possible in a two dimensional projection of a PDF document.
As you see, no spreadsheet tool nor MS Visio is listed in that repository mentioned above. Among those tools listed, I had a little exposure to

  • ARIS

  • OMNITRACKER and

  • Enterprise Architect

I’m wondering why none figures in Spiceworks product review section as all these are major and established solutions. And I didn’t know that ARIS now belongs to Software AG. When I used it, it belonged to a smaller company which seems to have been bought by Software AG in the meantime. Every of these tools needs some learning for proper use and management. ARIS has also integrations with web servers. It is impressive how you may navigate in ARIS in these dimensions, switching between processes, artefacts, roles and always see the relations to the other components, even when browsing in the web integration. If I remember it correctly, I used it first about 2 decades ago and encountered it later in other companies and other departments years later. When used first, I had to provide my model input for a business process in spreadsheet format and a partner organization was collecting these spreadsheets to generate a model for a larger business unit of a global corporation in ARIS.
I had heard also of MID Innovator and Alfresco. I want to take a look at Alfresco for different reasons but did not yet take the time.