SIPOC

What is a SIPOC diagram?

The SIPOC comes from quality-improvement practice. Teams usually fill it in by first naming the process and its start and end, then its customers and outputs, and finally its inputs and suppliers. Suppliers and customers can be internal departments as well as outside parties.

Its strength is agreement. In a few minutes, everyone sees where the process starts and stops, what it needs and what it delivers — which prevents mapping sessions from sprawling.

Not to be confused with a detailed process map or swimlane diagram. A SIPOC shows the boundaries of a process, not the flow of work inside it.

Why it matters for SMEs

For example: before a workshop on quote to order, an engineering firm fills in a SIPOC. Suppliers: the customer and the engineering team. Inputs: the request, drawings and site information. Outputs: a quote and, eventually, an order. Customers: the customer and production. The group agrees the process ends at the signed order, not at delivery.

For SMEs, it is a fast way to keep a first mapping effort small enough to finish.

SIPOC in the MentX approach

MentX captures how your company really works: the knowledge of your key people and the processes they run. We offer both a hands-on service approach — mapping your processes and capturing the knowledge behind them, from meetings, workshops and a guided intake — and our own personality-aware knowledge base, with full source attribution, in your own Knowledge Space. We build on the tools you already use and add best-practice solutions where they fit.

We use a SIPOC to agree the scope of a process before the discovery workshop, so the session starts with the work instead of the boundaries.