Basic Flowchart Symbols and Meaning

Flowchart Symbols and Meaning, workflow diagram symbols, process flow diagram symbols

Flowcharts are the best for visually representation the business processes and the flow of a custom-order process through various departments within an organization. ConceptDraw PRO diagramming and vector drawing software extended with Flowcharts solution offers the full set of predesigned basic flowchart symbols which are gathered at two libraries: Flowchart and Flowcharts Rapid Draw. Among them are: process, terminator, decision, data, document, display, manual loop, and many other specific symbols. The meaning for each symbol offered by ConceptDraw gives the presentation about their proposed use in professional Flowcharts for business and technical processes, software algorithms, well-developed structures of web sites, Workflow diagrams, Process flow diagram and correlation in developing on-line instructional projects or business process system. Use of ready flow chart symbols in diagrams is incredibly useful - you need simply drag desired from the libraries to your document and arrange them in required order. There are a few serious alternatives to Visio for Mac, one of them is ConceptDraw PRO. It is one of the main contender with the most similar features and capabilities.

How to Build a Flowchart

PM Dashboards

The PM Dashboards solution extends the management boundaries of ConceptDraw PRO and ConceptDraw PROJECT products with an ability to demonstrate changes to the budget status, to show the project progress toward its objectives, to display clearly the identified key performance indicator (KPI) or the set of key performance indicators for any project. This solution provides you with examples and ability to generate three types of visual dashboards reports based on your project data Project Dashboard, Tactical Dashboard, and Radar Chart. By dynamically charting the project’s key performance indicators that are collected on one ConceptDraw PRO document page, all project participants, project managers, team members, team leaders, stakeholders, and the entire organizations, for which this solution is intended, have access to the daily status of projects they are involved in.

Status Dashboard

Status dashboard solution extends ConceptDraw PRO software with templates, samples and vector stencils libraries with graphic indicators for drawing the visual dashboards showing status data.

Visual Reports

The Visual Reports solution extends abilities of ConceptDraw PROJECT by creating the illustrative, informative, colourful and comprehensible reports on a project in a form of visual graphs and diagrams of common types, such as Bar Charts, Pie Charts, Line Charts, Divided Bar Charts, Timelines, Dial Dashboards. This highly effective project management tool helps project managers and other stakeholders to report about the tasks statuses, the project progress and degree of its completion, to evaluate the project status, to depict the project expenses by days and to define the days that go beyond the budget, to compare visually the actual expenses and expected ones at the project planning stage, to generate the Resource chart depicting the utilization of project resources by days, and to show other useful information. The set of tailor-made examples developed for the Visual Reports solution allows designating advantages of each type of report included to this solution for the further use in your management work.

Entity Relationship Diagram Symbols

The semantic modeling method nowadays is successfully applied in database structure design. It is effective method of modeling the data structures, which is based on the meaning of these data. As a tool of semantic modeling, there are used different types of Entity-Relationship Diagrams. Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) is applied to visually and clearly represent a structure of a business database. The main components of ERDs are: entity, relation and attributes. An entity is a class of similar objects in the model, each entity is depicted in the form of rectangle and has the name expressed by a noun. Relation is shown in the form of non-directional line that connects two entities. There are several notation styles used for ERDs: information engineering style, Chen style, Bachman style, Martin Style. The Entity Relationship Diagram symbols used for professional ERD drawing are predesigned by professionals and collected in the libraries of the Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) solution for ConceptDraw PRO software.

Types of Flowcharts

A Flowchart is a graphical representation of process, algorithm, workflow or step-by-step solution of the problem. It shows the steps as boxes of various kinds and connects them by arrows in a defined order depicting a flow. There are twelve main Flowchart types: Basic Flowchart, Business Process Modeling Diagram (BPMN), Cross Functional Flowchart, Data Flow Diagram (DFD), IDEF (Integrated DEFinition) Flowchart, Event-driven Process Chain (EPC) Diagram, Influence Diagram (ID), Swimlane Flowchart, Process Flow Diagram (PFD), Specification and Description Language (SDL) Diagram, Value Stream Mapping, Workflow Diagram. Using the Flowcharts solution from the Diagrams area of ConceptDraw Solution Park you can easy and quickly design a Flowchart of any of these types. This solution offers a lot of special predesigned vector symbols for each of these widely used notations. They will make the drawing process of Flowcharts much easier than ever. Pay also attention for the included collection of ready Flowchart examples, samples and quick-start templates. This is business process improvement tools. If you are looking for MS Visio for your Mac, then you are out of luck, because it hasn't been released yet. However, you can use Visio alternatives that can successfully replace its functions. ConceptDraw PRO is an alternative to MS Visio for Mac that provides powerful features and intuitive user interface for the same.

How to Simplify Flow Charting

What is Gantt Chart (historical reference)

Gantt chart example - Strategic plan for hew business

Historical reference about the Gantt chart.

Relationships Analysis

Relationships Analysis. Relations Diagram - factors analysis, factors relations. Create Relations Diagram with ConceptDraw PRO. The Seven Management and Planning Tools is a tool for Interaction diagram drawing. This diagram identifies causal relationships. Determine what factors are causes and which factors are effects. Interaction diagram helps establish KPIs to monitor changes and the effectiveness of corrective actions in resolving the problem.

Swim Lane Flowchart Symbols

Use the set of special professionally developed swim lane flowchart symbols - single, multiple, vertical and horizontal lanes from the Swimlanes and Swimlanes BPMN 1.2 libraries from the Business Process Diagram solution, the Swim Lanes library from the Business Process Mapping solution as the perfect basis for your Swim Lane Flowcharts of processes, algorithms and procedures.

Affinity Diagram

The Affinity Diagram, also known as a KJ diagram, is a business tool invented for organization the large quantity of ideas and data. It is a part of Seven Management and Planning Tools, it is usually used right after brainstorming to sort large numbers of ideas into the corresponding groups. The Affinity Diagram helps to represent in a better way the structure of large and complex factors which influence on a problem, divides these factors into the smaller and simpler structures, and helps team members to see the patterns and identify possible solutions to problems they have. The diagrams of this type don't show the causal relationships between the factors, but they are designed to prepare the data for holding further analysis of the cause-effect relationships. Another area of Affinity Diagram usage is contextual inquiry as a way to sort observations and notes from field interviews, support call logs, open-ended survey responses organizing, etc. ConceptDraw MINDMAP software offers you the tools for easy holding brainstorming, generation ideas and creation MINDMAP Affinity Diagram.

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