History Of Flowchart Symbols
To document workflows often involving tasks documents and information in offices.
History of flowchart symbols. Basic symbols include processes and decision blocks. Event driven process chain epc flowchart. There are many flowchart symbols. The most frequently used.
Flowcharts were first a hand drawn chart which made changes very difficult and messy. This clear plastic flowcharting template has a grid of lines marked on it with some line segments darkened to assist in aligning the symbols on a flowchart. However if you want to get technical and precise there are preset rules and standards you can follow about flow chart symbols. To delineate who does what in cross team processes.
Wikipedia has a great summary of the history of flowcharts read more in this wiki section. Frank gilberth introduced flowcharts in 1921 and they were called process flow charts at the beginning. Flowcharts use special shapes to represent different types of actions or steps in a process. A flowchart is a type of diagram that represents a workflow or process a flowchart can also be defined as a diagrammatic representation of an algorithm a step by step approach to solving a task.
Swimlane diagram a k a swimlane flowchart. In fact a simple flowchart constructed with just rectangular blocks and flowlines can already get most jobs done. The flowchart shows the steps as boxes of various kinds and their order by connecting the boxes with arrows. Many of the twenty six symbols are labeled.
There are also symbols for advanced usage such as document database link etc. The decision symbol is used for things like if statements where you must choose an option based on a specified criteria. A scale of printer spacing runs from 0 to 90 across the top and a scale of card volume runs from 0 to 450 on the left. Flowchart symbols and meaning provides a visual representation of basic flowchart symbols and their proposed use in professional workflow diagram standard process flow diagram and communicating the structure of a well developed web site as well as their correlation in developing on line instructional projects.
Mogensen is credited with training business people on how to use flowcharts. These are known as flowchart symbols. To document or plan a business process. Flowchart is a very intuitive method to describe processes.
To representing step wise working processes in a graphical way using flow charting strategy has been used for a long time. As such in most cases you don t need to worry too much about the standards and rules of all the flowchart symbols.