IBM Blueworks Live is a powerful tool that serves as the entry point for digital transformation. During the early stages of this transformation, the focus shifts to the Gather phase, where you identify a project sponsor, align on business goals, assemble your team of subject matter experts (SMEs), and start mapping out the current state of your business processes. This phase is crucial, as it lays the foundation for understanding pain points and the existing process landscape.

In this blog, we’ll guide you through how to use Blueworks Live to create SIPOC and RACI charts, essential tools for effectively capturing and modeling your current state processes.

The Foundation: What Are SIPOC and RACI?

SIPOC stands for Supplier, Input, Process, Output, and Customer. It’s a tool that helps you define the boundaries of a process by identifying key components: who supplies the inputs, what the inputs are, what the process does, what the outputs are, and who consumes them. This simple yet powerful tool ensures you get a comprehensive understanding of the process you're modeling.

RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. It helps you assign roles and responsibilities to people involved in a process, making sure that everyone knows who’s doing what. RACI can help you clarify ownership and responsibilities, which is crucial for effective process management.

Getting Started: Defining the Level and Scope of Your Process

Before getting into SIPOC and RACI, it’s important to have clarity on how detailed your process model should be. Decide whether you need a broad, high-level outline that highlights the major milestones or a more granular view that captures step-by-step activities. A good approach is to begin with a broad view to align everyone on the overall flow, and then progressively add detail where needed.

Once the level of detail is set, define the boundaries of the process - where it starts, where it ends, and what outcomes it delivers. Clearly outlining its purpose and value helps establish a solid baseline for discovery and ensures your SIPOC and RACI work stays focused and relevant.

If you’d like more structured guidance on this, refer to Get Started with Modeling for Process Discovery.

Iterative Process Discovery: The Happy Path and Exception Paths

When starting your process discovery, it’s best to first capture the most typical way the process runs - often referred to as the “happy path” This gives you a clear, straightforward view of the core flow without getting distracted by variations or potential fixes. At this stage, the focus should be on documenting what happens today, not what should happen in an ideal world.

After mapping the primary flow, shift your attention to exceptions and alternate routes - the scenarios that occur less frequently but are still important to understand. Ranking these variations by how often they happen, and their impact can help you decide which ones deserve deeper analysis.

For a more detailed look at mapping current state processes, see Document and Model the Current State Process.

Layering in SIPOC and RACI: The Core of Process Understanding

Once you have the basic process flow captured, it’s time to enrich your model with SIPOC and RACI details. Here’s how you can integrate these into Blueworks Live:

SIPOC in Blueworks Live

For each activity within the process (first focusing on the Happy Path and then exception paths), you’ll gather the SIPOC information. Start with the high-level process and then go down to individual activities.

Table 1: SIPOC and Blueworks Live Attribute Mapping

In Blueworks Live, you can capture this SIPOC data by editing the process details.

Figure 1: SIPOC Activity Attributes

The Process Data - Excel Export feature is especially useful here. By exporting the process model to Excel, you can pull the data from the Suppliers, Inputs, Process Items, Outputs, and Customers received report. Then, simply organize these columns into your SIPOC table. This process will allow you to quickly collate and visualize the SIPOC chart.

Figure 2: Process Data Excel Export

RACI in Blueworks Live

The mapping to Blueworks Live attributes is provided in the process activity details as follows.

Table 2: RACI and Blueworks Live Attribute Mapping 

Note that the Informed attribute is less commonly captured, but if your team does want to document this attribute, you can define a custom property for this purpose in your Blueworks Live account as described in this posting. 

The RACI attributes should be captured in a similar manner to the SIPOC attributes, first at the process level itself, and then for each activity in the process. The RACI attributes are documented by editing the details as shown.

Figure 4: RACI Activity Attributes

Gathering the RACI information can take multiple passes over the process with different SMEs, like the approach for capturing the SIPOC attributes. To create a RACI chart, you can gather tasks from the Process Items sheet in Blueworks Live. Here’s how you can proceed:

1. Group Tasks by Milestones: In Blueworks Live, export your process model to Excel, where tasks will be listed under the Process Items sheet. Group these tasks based on the milestones or phases they belong to (such as "Background Check", "Offer", "Orientation", etc.).
2. Map RACI Roles: In the exported Excel file, add columns for each of the RACI roles (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed). For each task, assign the appropriate role to the respective person or team.
3. Create the RACI Diagram: Once you’ve organized the tasks and roles in Excel, you can easily visualize the RACI chart by filling out the grid. Each task will be associated with a specific person or team for each RACI category. This method will allow you to map out the responsibilities clearly and quickly.

Figure 5: RACI Chart

Using Process Data - Excel Export makes this process easy and flexible, as you can adjust and update the data as needed. While Blueworks Live doesn’t offer an automatic RACI diagram feature, the Excel export gives you all the raw data you need to manually build and customize the chart to fit your needs.

Conclusion

By the time you've completed these steps—modeling the current state with SIPOC and RACI - you’ll have a robust, detailed understanding of your as-is process. This baseline will serve as the foundation for future improvements and digital transformation efforts. The iterative nature of this process allows you to continuously refine your models as you gather new insights, making it easier to align all stakeholders and pinpoint areas of opportunity for transformation.