01 — Process landscape
Where the first processes sit
A manufacturer's landscape has the three usual bands. Management processes set the frame: strategy and planning, quality management, compliance, internal audit. One support process, supplier onboarding, sits unusually close to the core because production depends on it. The core is the order: received, planned, produced, checked, shipped and invoiced.
Order-to-delivery is captured first because everyone has an opinion about it and nobody owns it end to end: sales knows the first third, production the middle, logistics the end, and the waiting happens at the seams. Supplier onboarding follows because it is short, crosses procurement, quality and finance, and carries the documents that audits ask about. Once both exist, the next processes are drawn with the same lanes.
HIGHLIGHTED: TYPICALLY CAPTURED FIRST
02 — Example processes
Two processes to start with
Both diagrams are fictional example models, drawn the way patchley draws them: one lane per department, systems and documents at the step that uses them, the quality release and the supplier approval as marked control steps. The .bpmn file of each example is available on request.
Order-to-delivery
A customer places an order. Sales enters it and checks availability, planning schedules the production order, production builds, quality checks and releases, logistics packs and ships, and finance invoices. On paper this is a straight line. In the plant it loops: a missing part sends the order back to planning, a failed check back to production, and a changed delivery date restarts the planning.
- The quality release is a marked control step: nothing ships without it, and the diagram shows who gives it.
- The hand-overs between lanes: sales to planning, planning to production, production to logistics, each a place where the order waits.
- Which steps happen in the ERP system and which are still an email, a printed order or a phone call.
Supplier onboarding
A department requests a new supplier. Procurement asks for the documents, quality qualifies the supplier against the requirements, finance checks the commercial details, procurement approves, and the master data is created. The process is short, but the approval depends on documents from outside the company, and the diagram shows where the request waits for them.
- The supplier approval as a control step, and the qualification by quality that comes before it.
- Three lanes with a say: procurement, quality and finance, and the order in which they see the file.
- Where the process waits for certificates and declarations from the supplier, and what happens when they do not arrive.
03 — What matters here
Control steps, roles and documents
In manufacturing the diagram has to show the releases that must not be skipped, the departments as lanes with their hand-overs, and the documents that an audit will ask for later. This is general orientation on what to capture, not legal advice.
Control steps
Incoming goods inspection, the quality release before shipping, the supplier approval, the change approval when a drawing or a delivery date changes. A marked control step names who releases, what is checked and which record remains, which is what a quality audit follows later.
Roles in lanes
Customer, sales, planning, production, quality, logistics, procurement, finance, process owner. One lane per department makes every hand-over visible, and the hand-overs are where orders wait. Lanes can be taken from the org chart.
Documents and systems
Customer order, order confirmation, production order, inspection record, delivery note, invoice; supplier questionnaire, certificates, approved supplier list; the ERP, the quality system and the warehouse system behind them. Each document is attached to the step that creates or needs it.
The quality manual describes the intended process. The diagram captured with the people in the plant shows the actual one, including the loops, and only the actual process can be checked, improved or handed to an AI agent later.
04 — How a first process is captured
From the plant's own words to a diagram, analyses and a deck
A first process in manufacturing is captured with the people who run it: a sales colleague, a planner and a shift lead walk through one real order in a workshop, patchley listens live or joins the Microsoft Teams call, or it reads the existing work instruction as a PDF or DOCX. They correct the draft diagram on the screen in their own words.
EXPORTS: BPMN 2.0 XML, SVG, PNG, XLSX, POWERPOINT · APP HOSTED IN GERMANY · AI MODELS FROM A EUROPEAN PROVIDER, HOSTED IN THE EU
05 — The industry report
Process capture in manufacturing, as a document
The report describes the typical core processes, where process knowledge gets lost, the regulatory context in general terms (ISO 9001, the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, the EU AI Act), where AI agents can help and which guardrails they need, and how to start. Fictional examples, no client data.