I had planned to write a piece on my upcoming process mapping software, since I have been fielding a lot of questions on it lately. But it was one of those days, and I got sidetracked by coincidence. I was in my garage searching for a old copy of the ANSI standard for process mapping symbols without any luck, and what do I find sitting inside the last box I looked in? Cheaper by the Dozen.

A few years ago I got stuck had the pleasure of taking my kids to go see the latest remake of it with Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt, and the remaining cast of wacky characters. Steve Martin plays football coach, which is kind of sad because that’s not the original story at all. In the real life story, the dad was an Engineer. Egad! We can’t be having that in Hollywood. In Hollywood, ‘business people’ are in advertising, publishing, or at least sales. Definitely NOT Engineering. But even a generic business career was too bland, so they recast the role as a football coach.

The original semi-autobiographical story was written by the children of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. Frank was not a football coach. He started out as a bricklayer and went on to become a management engineer. Together he and Lillian collaborated on the study of work motion that became one of the foundations of Industrial Engineering. There’s a ton of material available detailing his career, and quite frankly it was the kind of stuff that would put me to sleep as an undergrad. So I won’t pretend that it’s interesting now.

But the irony is, Frank Gilbreth is also the inventor of Process Charts. That’s what I was looking for! And all I found was a lame Hillary Duff movie.

Gilbreth’s Process Charts were a predecessor of flowcharts. They used 5 basic symbols: a Circle for Operation; a Square for Inspection; an inverted Triangle for Storage; a block Arrow for Transportation, and a big D for Delay. These symbols were adopted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) when they published the first standard on process mapping symbols, which I believe evolved later to become ANSI Y15.3M, Operation and Flow Process Charts Standard.

This year the ASME withdrew the ANSI Y15.3 standard.

It’s just as well. The problem with Process Chart symbols is that there really isn’t a standard that anyone adheres to. Plus, there exist several other standards for process flowchart symbols, and they all stink.

Since FlowBreeze is an Excel add-in, it uses the symbol set included with Microsoft Office. I don’t know the official source of their symbol set, but as far as I can tell it’s exactly the same as the template that IBM used in the 1960’s for data processing flowchart symbols. That’s why every version of Microsoft Office ships with such useful symbols as Punch Tape, Card, and Sequential Access Storage.

The process mapping version of FlowBreeze will include the capability to use traditional process mapping symbols, as well as many other features. A run down of those will have to wait for another blog post…