ARIS BPA Reviews

We use ARIS BPA for process modeling and the repository of our processes.

ARIS BPA has the kind of database structure to report from across all the models, roles, and systems. The solution provides integrations to ServiceNow and other systems, flexibility of connectivity, and reporting.

Sometimes, ARIS BPA breaks down, and its stability can be improved.

We had ARIS BPA in our organization for ten years, but it was never really leveraged. We have been using it more heavily for a year now.

Around 500 users are using ARIS BPA in our organization.

The solution’s initial setup seems to be a bit difficult.

I would recommend ARIS BPA to other users.

Overall, I rate ARIS BPA an eight out of ten.

My experience with the product was great. The tool has good navigation.

The tool must provide more documents. If someone gets stuck while using the product, the documents will help them to deal with issues.

I am learning the solution currently.

The tool is stable.

The support team resolved my issues. I rate the support a seven and a half or eight out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward. The solution is deployed on the cloud. It took us a few days to deploy it.

The product is a bit pricey.

ARIS BPA is my first BPA solution. I heard about it and thought to start working with it. I saw some YouTube videos and gathered some knowledge about it. It was a great experience. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Over the years I have used ARIS in many ways depending on the project, and I have experience with many different versions of it. I've used versions seven, eight, and now ten. About ten years ago, I worked on developing ARIS and its standardization for six months.
When I first started using it, I used to build a center of excellence for a global project. We used it to document the expansion process of our company to the global market. There were a lot of Visio files and it was quite disorganized since anyone could edit the files however they would like. We tried to turn the Visio files into something more formal. For a year, we used a low-end tool to document the process. With ARIS, we documented around 2,000 processes. We used it to organize and create a publishment where people could find what they're looking for.

I like everything about ARIS BPA. I've used it for a long time and I think it's a fantastic tool. There is a list of things ARIS has that other solutions do not have.

The solution does not have an efficient way to track employees' work. It shows who worked on something last, but that overwrites the history of changes in a way. It is supposed to provide information on team activity, but it does not do that. The creators of the solution elaborated in great detail on quality control and thought about every possibility, but they didn't make that useful and simple to use. The overhead maintenance is good.

I have been using ARIS BPA since 2010. 

The solution is very scalable. A ten out of ten. There is nothing even remotely close to it on the market. 

ARIS BPA is an extremely stable solution.

ARIS' technical support team is great.

Positive

Many years ago, we used BusinessOptix at our company. 

The initial setup of ARIS BPA is simple. When we first started using it, it was deployed on-premises. The latest version was deployed on cloud and it only takes a few days. It promises to teach you how to do that, but that is not very helpful since your company's team and organization need to be suitable for this kind of complexity. It's web-based, but there are technical limits to what you can do with it. In a way, it encourages you to purchase more and more if you want to maximize its usability. It does not teach you how to use it and it's very formal. Although ARIS is a fantastic tool, it would be better if it was focused on the customer's success. It requires a lot of maintenance.

ARIS BPA is extremely expensive and the training time for it is extensive.

I had a hard time with ARIS' access and licensing policy. It requires you to pay for each step you want to take forward with the solution. To get the documentation, you need to be an administrator. If you want the license to read the documentation of the process, you need to be some kind of administrator/support account, but you will need to pay for the support. Even if I'm qualified they will not provide me with the documentation. Instead, they will ask you to print it out and send the request to them. I had to wait two months to get the account and six months to get the contract. All of that is extremely time-consuming.

I have seen how MEGA works and it is definitely more user-friendly than ARIS.

The requirements are extremely high and it takes a skilled professional to use it properly. Whether it's a big or a small company, it has to be used by someone who is familiar with its complexity. You should be aware before purchasing the solution that it is not simple to use and it takes time to learn. ARIS' free tool is much easier to use. I work in Germany, but I think they made ARIS less complex in other countries.

When it comes to ARIS BPA as a tool, I would rate it a solid ten out of ten. It's a fantastic tool, but it is not easy to achieve results with it. The chances of producing what is promised by the vendor are zero.

We are modeling different processes and documenting all of them using the solution.

It's a really nice and user-friendly tool, and we can extract different reports from it. We have had different processes modeling and everything done with the solution. With the solution, we were using it for documenting, and then now we are updating all of these. So it's been great software for everyone.

We would have appreciated it if the company who has sold the software could show us how we can create our own reports, apart from showing us how to extract different SOPs and run our own scripts. So that would have been helpful for us.

An area where it lacks and can be considered for improvement in the future is if we can somehow automate or learn how we can automate different processes. So, it's like The processes in which we initiate a request, and we can follow where the request is and how the workflow management is being done in different software. So if you can somehow learn how we can do it, it will be great.

I have been using ARIS BPA for two years. I am a user of the solution. I don't remember the version.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten.

My designers are very few in number, but there are a lot of users. Also, we have a lot of viewers. We have around 10 designers and more than 2,000 viewers. We frequently use the solution in our company.

The support for the solution is good. I rate the support a ten out of ten.

Positive

Previously, I used Microsoft Visio for process mapping.

The solution is easy to install. It wasn't hours but maybe days to do the deployment, but it was done swiftly. It wasn't an issue.

I don't remember how many days it took to deploy. But currently, we have multiple designer licenses. So now the deployment doesn't take long. We can use it. Also, I wasn't involved in the installation process.

If we get stuck with the installation part, we request the provider company to let us know how to proceed.

I can't speak about pricing because I was not involved during the installation days.

It's a great system for viewing, modeling, and everything, extracting different kinds of reports. So the only thing is that the users must understand how different reports can be extracted. What are the different attributes or the fields, what is their purpose, and learn how analysis can be done. So we need to do the aforementioned things, and overall it is great software.

On a scale from one to ten, one is worse, and ten is the best, I rate the overall solution a ten.

We use BPA for modeling and documenting in a central repository. We are customers of ARIS and I'm a process professional. 

I value the reporting as well as the information query features, they are both very useful. It gives us a common language and a common repository, and we're able to control the workflow and relevant key processes. We're also able to utilize all the additional data that we capture and provide a holistic view of how our processes impact other areas of the organization.

Although the reporting and the information query features are good, they could do with some improvement. I'd also like to see better control over the library assets. It takes a lot of effort to maintain all the different types of central libraries. I'd like to see a simplification of the automation in the next update, it's currently quite a complex process. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The stability of the system is good. We've had some minor issues when they're running maintenance activities but other than that, the solution is stable. 

The technical support is reasonable.

I've also used Bizagi quite a lot but I like ARIS because we're able to extract a lot more information. Bizagi has the ability to start executing processes via the platform, which is a definite advantage over ARIS. Once we model a process in Bizagi, we can configure it and create an executable web service out of it. 

The solution is deployed across the entire company, almost everyone uses it.
We currently have around 600 users, but we're planning to scale up to approximately 2,500 soon. We have around 30 people maintaining the data.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

I have been working with ARIS across different projects in several companies, including a project where we implemented ARIS.

In my current company, we use ARIS for business process mapping, capability management, and process analysis. In some of my previous jobs, we used it as a tool for quality and compliance management, because processes are obviously the basis for audits. In this respect, ARIS always came in very handy.

It is pretty easy for users to get access to published processes. With regards to published content, I can think of one or two enhancements but overall, it's pretty easy. When you know how you need to do it, then it's a good tool.

ARIS has the largest BPM community in the world, although I don't particularly care about the size. The important part is how active it is. For example, if you have 1,000 people that form a community but nobody is saying a word, then the community is useless.

Software AG is promoting the ARIS community quite heavily, and they may have started to rebuild it with this platform. People tend to use it more frequently and I personally try to contribute to the content. Essentially, for me, the engagement of the community is more important than its size.

As a process management tool, it provides a lot of transparency when it comes to processes. This means that people have a solid basis for discussion and this is important because only when you have a process mapped, people will understand how it works. Sometimes, they will then even say that they have understood the process to be something totally different.

In general, process mapping using ARIS is a really good basis to get discussions going and also for audits to ensure or to prove to the auditor that you have good processes in place.

My gut feeling is that ARIS helps to save us time on business process analysis. However, it is difficult to confirm because we wouldn't be able to measure that. It certainly helps to create transparency when it comes to processes, and thus automatically increases their effectiveness. This suggests that it saves time.

ARIS is very user-friendly compared to other BPM tools that I have used. The user has a really modern view when they're using the ARIS Connect platform, which is the web-based part of the application.

In general, the users really like it and they can get started using it very easily.

For some people, ARIS is quite intuitive when it comes to business process management and modeling. In the time that I have spent training people, I have found that there are two mindsets. If somebody is a very organized and structured person then it will be relatively easy to get started with ARIS. However, if somebody is more creative then it tends to be quite difficult for them. That said, these people would have the same difficulty when using other process management tools. The reason is that process management is about structure. For those with that type of mindset, it's really easy to get started.

As an administrator with several years of experience with ARIS, I find that getting end-users set up is a really easy thing to do.

I really like the large variety of functionality that ARIS provides. If you look at it from a methodology perspective, you have more than 100 different diagrams or model types that you can choose from. It's really flexible in all of your modeling needs.

You can easily model process diagrams, but you can also model bowtie diagrams, UML diagrams, and more. ARIS has a really wide range of functionality. 

I really like the EPC modeling because it allows you to model not only the doer's perspective, which is often done with BPMN notation, but it also allows you to model the contributors or the people who are accountable or informed in your processes. When it comes to manual processes or semi automatic processes, this is really useful because this is where you can improve a lot.

The Risk and Compliance Management tool is rather complex. So, we customized it. Customization was done by SAG and was done fast.

The facility for sharing content should be enhanced. For example, it would be nice if you could share content with viewers who do not explicitly have access to the model. As it is now, if you share a process with somebody that does not have access to the model, then the person receives a link that simply tells them they have no access.

Particularly, when you're in the process of modeling something and you want to share it because you want to get feedback from your colleagues, I would appreciate being able to share that content. It could be valid for a period, such as 24 hours or one week. This is something that would help.

I have been using ARIS since 2009. This has been in various positions in different companies.

Stability has increased a lot since I began working with it. I remember in one of the earlier versions, perhaps version 7 or version 9, there was a lot of trouble. We would run into unexpected errors, some of which were quite severe. Since then, however, there have been some errors, but it's pretty much stable.

There are different roles depending on the employee. We have regular employees who can read or view content. They can also comment on it. We also have employees, such as team leads, with modeling privileges. There is a big variety in terms of the different roles that people have.

We have approximately 130 modelers that use ARIS. When I run training sessions, I shift licenses from one person to another.

I don't have much experience with scaling but for our current use cases, it is sufficient.

ARIS definitely enables you to start small and increase usage over time. This is very important to us because it requires you to have a process-driven mindset in the company. This mindset becomes part of the organizational culture, and culture is something that evolves over time. Importantly, developing the proper mindset is a journey so you need to start small and then grow, otherwise, it will not really work. That's the nature of cultural development.

Generally, as process management is something that evolves over time, we expect our usage of ARIS to grow. Some people are early adopters but for others, it happens a bit later. Right now, the speed is increasing when it comes to the adoption of process management, which means that more people are using ARIS and have been requesting modeler licenses. This is something that is quite good.

I really like the support and I would rate them an A+.

Their response times are really good. Whenever I have a question, I get an answer, or at least I know that somebody is taking care of my ticket really quickly.

They do not close tickets without asking, which I appreciate a lot. So, from time to time, I've received an email notification asking, "Hey, can we close this ticket? Did we answer your question sufficiently?" This is also something that I value a lot.

Support also asks for feedback. The head of the global support team has also checked with me whether I had any ideas for improvements. The fact that they are always seeking to become better is another thing that I really like.

Neutral

I have some experience with other BPM tools but nothing as extensively as ARIS.

One of these is Signavio, and the ARIS interface is more user-friendly. Also, when I tested Signavio a few years back, they did not have as wide a range of functionality available.

From an implementation perspective, it was rather straightforward.

My colleagues at my previous company found the technical installation documentation really difficult.

As an end-user and ARIS administrator, I knew what the different steps were in order for people to start using it. From this perspective, I found it really easy.

Leaving the technical aspect aside, because it took our IT department quite a long time to deploy it, I was able to complete my part of the implementation in less than a week.

Their license model is really difficult to understand, and licenses are quite expensive. However, with the new subscription model, it's fair that you can rent licenses for a specific time and then give them back. From that perspective, it's okay.

In general, the licensing model is not clear and the complexity is growing. In the past, I was not able to get information whether new functionalities are available for us. This situation has been communicated and should improve: For me as an administrator it is annoying when people ask me about new features and functionalities, and I tell them what is coming, only to later find out that the feature is not available for us. After some discussions you find out that you need a license. This has happened to me two or three times and it is really embarrassing.

In our test environment, we use version 16 of ARIS. However, in our production environment, we use version 15.

We are currently doing a proof of concept project for the ARIS Risk and Compliance Manager. I believe the ARIS GRC has some potential, although it's a rather complex tool, which you definitely need to customize if you want to use it. It offers so many functions and functionalities that if you haven't had a real profound training of it, you will not really understand. So, at least in the beginning, you need to reduce the complexity of the tool. This is the approach that we took with the proof of concept project.

To this point, we have not used the ARIS process mining capabilities ourselves- but did a proof of concept with SAG. The support we received was really great. We haven't used the RPA functionality (yet). We are in the pre-project implementation phase of the AI-enabled translation services.

My advice for anybody who is implementing ARIS is that from a tool perspective, limit the functionality for the end-users. I strongly recommend using filters and to start small. Only allow limited functionality and a few attributes because the more complex a system you start with, the more difficult it is for a user to really understand how it is supposed to work.

That said, if anybody does have problems then I recommend contacting support. I've never experienced a situation where support was not willing or was not able to help. To assist them, it may seem like a standard practice but I suggest adding screenshots because it facilitates communication with them.

New users should also contribute to the ARIS community because the bigger the community is, the more powerful it is. When you have, for instance, new enhancement requests or feature requests, then this community can help to push these new features into a new release.

There is room for improvement but overall, I really like working with ARIS.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The core use case is rooted in a non-financial risk program. For people reading who aren't involved in financial services, there are both financial risks within financial institutions making credit and lending decisions and non-financial risks, which are similar to those faced by many enterprises. These are the elements within life which can negatively impact a business that are not related to finance. A really good example is COVID in the last couple of years, which caused fundamental shifts in operating models. Therefore, our program is seeking to address the non-financial risks within our environments, which is being done through initially capturing the processes that power the bank.

At the end of November, we recently completed a migration into the cloud solution provided by Software AG. As a consequence of that, we jumped a number of versions to 10.15.

It is a private cloud SaaS solution provided by Software AG.

We are still in the early stages. We are in year three of the rollout for ARIS with this use case. Although it is still very early on, we are starting to see, as a result of the deployment of ARIS, the building out of end-to-end processes used within the group have much stronger cross-team, cross-divisional collaboration, e.g., it has a very clear, specific focus and outcome. So, there is a purpose to it beyond the theoretical need for people to work together. 

We are starting to see the beginnings of a more robust operational resilience capability within the bank. That will be delivered in stages and phases over the next two years.

We are also beginning to see, across a number of business divisions, a more effective early-stage analysis of business processes. Then, that leads to the optimization of those processes and the removal of customer pain points. Without a shadow of a doubt, right across the business, that is happening.

ARIS by Software AG for the most part is incredibly intuitive at the mapper and business division level. We have had many cases where we work with our colleagues across the bank who have been experiencing using solutions like Visio. Once they have a core understanding of its processes from a visual sense, they can very quickly and intuitively start to use ARIS. As you get more into the complexity of the analysis, reporting, and administration, then that intuitiveness is less obvious. However, that is a case where you receive more training and are undertaking much more complex tasks. As a tool that is used by non-technical colleagues within the business division, the first line within the bank can strongly recommend it.

This solution gives us an easy way to enable visibility for our colleagues across 11 business divisions, and a couple of countries that we work in, on how the bank operates. We are in phase two of a multi-year program to build out those processes. What we are starting to do now is build out end-to-end views. As processes, data, and customer contacts span multiple parts of the bank, we are building out full end-to-end views so colleagues will have visibility across the group.

One of the many advantages of ARIS is that it is supported by a very strong BPM community, which is critical for us. Although Business Process Management has been in business for many years, it is still at an early stage of evolution. There are so many instances where your specific use case or requirement for using ARIS hasn't necessarily been matured across the sector. So, you need access to a very active community to help you explore possible solutions and ways in which ARIS can be used to achieve those use cases.

The areas of ARIS where we see room for improvement are actually related to the background services that support it. Over the last number of years, Software AG has moved from an on-premises solution into deploying a SaaS solution to their enterprise base. That has been really successful from my point of view, as I have been a customer of ARIS, managing the relationship, for a couple years. Certain support functions around the knowledge base, customer service, and the information available on modules within the core ARIS component are lagging behind the SaaS movement. 

Traditionally, enterprise software is sold by sales people pitching to customers individually. Once you move into the SAAS environment, everything becomes more digital, and they haven't yet fully moved into that space.

I have been using this solution for four years within the bank.

We have had no issues with the stability of ARIS in the cloud. We had issues with the stability of ARIS as a hosted solution internally, but that reflects on our capability rather than being a reflection of their software.

We have a COE (Center of Excellence) that both supports the deployment and maintenance of ARIS, and more specifically is part of the non-financial risk and operational resilience team. So, we have a CORE team of about 18, but very few of those are specifically focused on the maintenance and support of the deployment of ARIS. There are only two or three people within that COE team who are required for that task. The wider task is the support of business colleagues through a hub and spoke model. Within the small COE team, we support the acquisition and enhancement of those skill sets within our business division colleagues.

ARIS has very much enabled us to start small and grow with the use of the solution over time. We have adopted the approach, as we roll out ARIS, of taking small pilot proof of concepts and extending them wider across the business. Software AG ARIS has really facilitated that rollout, both in terms of the technical support provided and also the licensing that has been available to us.

This is critical for any enterprise taking on an enterprise-wide BPM program, moving into a business-as-usual (BAU) function, to be able to take it in small steps. I know colleagues across the globe in different enterprises who have done this. They have picked initial areas of small-scale deployment, then extended them over time.

We have something in the region of 100 to 200 users. We are still midway through a wider deployment.

Recently, there was a switch to a new platform that had one or two technical challenges, which seemed to have interrupted it. Any transition to a new support platform is always a bit problematic. Because they haven't yet fully picked back up, I would rate them as seven out of 10.

Broadly speaking, over the last couple of years, the customer support has been really good.

Neutral

ARIS is the first time that the bank has deployed an enterprise-wide BPM solution.

The reason that we have ARIS in the bank is because one of our vendors recommended it.

For our setup of the recent migration, which we completed over an eight-week period, we found the migration of our ARIS instance into the cloud to be really smooth and well-supported by the Software AG Professional Services team.

The initial setup of ARIS within the bank was held and managed by a different team.

If you were to look at the return on investment that the bank will make in terms of its use of ARIS, it can't be measured in financial terms. The use and deployment of ARIS across business divisions gives us the capability to understand and monitor processes enterprise-wide. This is improving dramatically our operational resilience, which is both a regulatory and operational requirement for us. We haven't attempted to put a financial measure on that outcome.

Software AG facilitate a gradual and phased approach to enterprise deployment so take full advantage of that. In addition (and obviously in 2022) opt for their Cloud solution. 

ARIS is best of breed. We are obviously aware of other solutions globally and there are a handful in the space that have specific capabilities that would have loosely matched what ARIS can do for us. Time and time again, we come away with the impression that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to move from ARIS. More specifically, we have visibility, as do any of their customers, into their roadmap over the next couple of years. We are very comfortable with it continuing to be exactly what we need.

We haven't used the governance, risk and compliance component (the GRC component) within ARIS. The introduction of ARIS into the risk part of the business through the non-financial risk program happened after the bank had already committed and put in place a risk register, which is powered by IBM OpenPages. So, we work alongside that.

We have an RPA capability within the bank that preceded the introduction of ARIS. That is embedded within our operational model and continues to be the case. As with every bank that has a long legacy of serving its customers, over the last couple of years, we have accelerated our RPA capability to the point where, in Europe, our bank has one of the most mature RPA capabilities.

Because of our use case and the level of detail, where we are currently operating and mapping processes, we have no requirements for the solution's mining capabilities.

One of my colleagues worked with Software AG for years. So, within the CORE team, we had an embedded set of knowledge on ARIS, which is unusual within one of their enterprise customers. Within the wider business use, ARIS absolutely provides us capabilities that we didn't know that we needed until we saw them. However, the Group is in its infancy in terms of understanding ARIS's power of process analysis and improvement.

Overall, I would rate the solution as eight out of 10.

We use the solution to collect information, design, publish, and validate the process. We can implement the process according to the improvements that can be retrieved. We monitor the process before the four phases of discovery, design, publishing, and implementation.

BPA is used to represent reality. We need to find and implement potential improvements from a workshop presentation and then monitor the results. We are not implementing these tools to plan and organize artifacts. This tool covers everything except implementation because that is not the purpose of a BPA tool. However, this tool can interface with implementation tools, and after implementation, you can use APIs and other interfaces to get information back from reality. In terms of improvement, the app could use some small details and functionalities. However, I need more time to sync to get more specific suggestions. We already have interfaces for these four tools, and it is possible to develop interfaces for the other four tools. 

Inside the product, we can have a developer environment where we can create new scripts using APIs or STPI. This is the environment that we use to help interface the tools. In the past, we had many packages of interfaces. The suppliers of the provider preferred to have these package interfaces. We like to open the code, at least part of the code, with APIs and other things like this so that the consultants can create the interfaces with the specific tools. We use APIs and other search tools for this.

I have been using ARIS BPA for more than 30 years.

The technical support is good.

Positive

The product is expensive. People who don't understand BPA or only understand a little bit about it often compare tools with videos and things like this, which are not comparable. They may have a lot of models and artifacts, but nothing is aligned or consistent. Customers prefer to start with fizzes and things like this, and later on, they come back and prefer to use a more professional tool.

The solution is not easy to use. People at the operational level don't have the abstraction level needed for this proposal. When they get information from business people, they immediately decide on the other model. They come with additional information from other business departments and do the same. To do things properly, you need to think about a proper structure based on components. Then, when you get new information from previous areas, for example, IT, you should frame this further information or these recent changes in the structure you previously found. Otherwise, you're constantly reacting, doing a lot of ad hoc models. You'll have a lot of content without alignment, sense, or semantics. 

The first step is to contact the customer. The next step is to present the customer with some proposals because when you present the proposal to them, they may accept or reject it. If they leave it, what will you do? This flexibility allows you to generate different views of the process for different stakeholders. For example, someone in top management might want to see a view from the customer contact until the proposal. Another person might want to see everything. You can take all of the components that you have designed before and create a specific view for them. It’s only about how to design business processes. It depends on the other two. One of the primary and critical requirements is to create business processes based on specific components that are well-linked and aligned together, in order to avoid ad hoc models. Ad hoc models are not very good. They do not work in the future. Usually, people start doing this because it is easier. This is closer to how ordinary people think. 

Still, in the middle and long term, you will realize that it is not manageable because you have to prepare models, a visualization of things, and different models of the same reality. You will not know what the source of truth is at a certain point in time because you have many different presentations of the same fact. For me, this structure is crucial. This is where it should start: defining the system, how you will model it, and the methodology. What are the pros and cons of the method? How will you capture, model, validate, implement, and monitor the information? You must define this beforehand, at the beginning of any project. Otherwise, forget about it, regardless of your tool, because it is more about the concepts. If you don't have the right concepts, then forget about it. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.