ARIS BPA Reviews

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 have three main use cases. One is process management and the second is ICS (internal control system). Our third use case is very important for us: to evaluate the operational risk situation of our company, not only of the company itself but of the whole group. It was one of our requirements to find a system that could, on the one hand, evaluate risks for each company in the group, and on the other hand, conglomerate these risk situations for the whole group.

We use ARIS Risk & Compliance Manager (ARCM) for our ICS. There are different people who have to evaluate the risks and actualize the processes. We have a workflow implemented so that there is a reminder for the people who have to evaluate the risks and the controls, once a year. We also have a workflow for the process owners to assign a process model.

For our ICS, we used to have an Excel- and Word-based solution. It was very complicated and it was not really digital. Now, it's very simple for the people who have to evaluate the risks. They get a reminder from Outlook that a certain risk needs to be evaluated and they can evaluate it and send it to the risk owner. It's a more digital process and has improved things.

With our ICS we didn't have control of the controls, and this is something we are now working on. It is very easy in ARIS to model it and evaluate it. This was something we learned about and a capability we didn't have before.

The browser-based modeling tool is very awesome. It's very easy for the people who use it. One of our aims was and is to use ARIS in a decentralized way. That means we want our business departments to be able to publish their processes and to evaluate risk and controls. For that purpose, we have ARIS BPA and ARCM, which are connected. We model the risks and controls on the process diagrams, and the evaluation of risks and controls take place in ARCM.

ARIS BPA provides very good visibility and control of processes because we have a concurrent license system. As a result, every person in our company and group is able to look at the published processes. We have also built a tree from a process map so that people can navigate through different steps to the process model itself. That works quite well.

The intuitiveness of ARIS when it comes to business process management and modeling is not quite there. We have invested a lot of time and money in building a very usable system. The modeling part is very intuitive, but there are so many possible elements you can use. We had to invest a lot of time to reduce the elements to those we want people to use. If you take all the elements and all the modeling types that ARIS has, it is not possible to model in an equal way.

Also, we are part of a community that has one or two events per year where we can talk about our experiences with the solution. From these meetings, my impression is that a lot of customers do not use the current release. Migration to the next release is very tricky. You can't do it without support from ARIS or from a software kit. And it takes a lot of time and a lot of money to migrate. My impression is that a lot of companies do not migrate regularly because of that issue. There are always a lot of bugs, especially when you adapt the system to your needs. It's very complicated.

We have been using ARIS BPA since 2020.

The stability has been okay. We haven't had any interruptions so far and the concurrent license model works very well. We have enough licenses that people don't have any problem getting into the system.

The scalability is good because it is a modular system, and that was another factor in our decision to go with ARIS. You can buy additional modules to adapt it to your needs.

The solution enables you to start small and grow its use.

For small problems, their tech support is okay. 

For larger problems, it's more complicated to explain to their tech support what we really need. Our experience has been that it's better to buy two or three consultant-days with the consultant who knows our system, because he developed it together with us. He can identify problems very easily. With the regular tech support it takes a long time to explain what the problem is.

Neutral

Casewise – EA & BPM was the system we had before. It was a system that wasn't fit for our decentralization goals because it was very complicated. There were a few specialists in our company who could work with Casewise, but it was really a system for specialists and not for business departments.

The initial setup was complex. Ours is a complicated environment and we had complex requirements. But we had really good trainers from Software AG. They have a lot of knowledge and they were able to help adapt the solution to our needs. But it was a very long process to get the system to where we wanted it to be. It took about a year for the implementation.

We have done two migrations since we deployed the solution. One migration was during the implementation phase, and the second is being done now. As I said, the migrations are very complicated.

We looked at Signavio, in addition to Casewise, among the solutions we looked at in an intensive way.

Signavio was okay, but it didn't fit our needs when it came to risk management, and their licensing system also didn't fit our requirements.

We deployed the solution on-premises because our IT security team is very strict. We don't have any cloud solutions so far. This was one of the topics that influenced our decision to go with ARIS. Other solutions prefer the cloud or develop cloud products in a more efficient way. Our aim was to have a product that works on-premises.

We do not have a lot of experience because we implemented process management, as a strategy, in 2019. Before that, processes were not really the focus of the business departments. IT had processes in mind, of course, but they only used drawing tools that were not management tools. There is now more awareness of process management in our company, not only in IT but in the business departments as well. Still, at the moment, people see it as additional work, but I hope that will get better.

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.

We use ARIS BPA for various operations and processes.

ARIS BPA has a good directory option, which helps to keep track of all of your metadata, and that's very useful.

It would be helpful if ARIS BPA could have a simple database to get the extract of various attributes.

The solution should include a simpler database where one can select the required columns or attributes to be downloaded and various reports. Also, the report formats could be simpler.

I have been using ARIS BPA for three years.

ARIS BPA is a stable solution.

ARIS BPA is a scalable solution. We have close to 20 to 30 end users working on the solution.

The solution’s technical support is good.

Positive

SAP is better than ARIS BPA because it has some positive features.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

It is easy to maintain ARIS BPA. The solution is deployed on-cloud in our organization.

ARIS BPA is a simple-to-use solution with good cloud-based support.

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

I am part of an IT service organization and working in capacity of Advisory Consultant where various customers seek advice for Business Process Analysis. The primary use case is Business Architecture Modeling, however, I've suggested ARIS BPA as an upstream to many implementations. 

I have used ARIS Architect, Designer, and ARIS Connect for various other models to complete overall Enterprise Architecture Modeling be it Applications Models, Information/Data Models or Technology/Infrastructure Models. 

ARIS-Solman Integration is another useful use case when it comes to ARIS BPA.

ARIS BPA supports various model types for business processes, customer journeys, organizational charts, applications, information, and technology views along with product and service views. It brings transparency and 360-degree views of end-to-end processes. 

Also, it avoids needing heavy documentation to maintain attributes/properties of processes, organization units, roles, positions, applications, systems, data clusters, and products and services. This list is still not comprehensive. We can easily customize attributes based on our needs and keep the information up to date. This is another important benefit that ARIS BPA has bought.

ARIS BPA provides a variety of features, however, the feature to look at the same model from a different perspective is amazing. We can show the information/view which is relevant to specific stakeholders. This also helps to avoid creating multiple views of the same model and saves a lot of time. 

Also, creating various queries, ad-hoc queries, and reports (what you see what you get) helped us in analyzing the information which is captured on these ARIS models and helped with rapid impact analysis for our application and role rationalization project.

Simulation is one area that is a bit complex. Nowadays, we are talking of digital twins. We should have simulation functionality offered in a simple way and promote process twin. Also, dashboarding is another important area where some other BI tools provide very aesthetic looks to different dashboards (e.g. PowerBI) - although ARIS Process Mining can bring us that. 

In ARIS BPA, if we are providing a dashboarding feature, aesthetics could be improved and dashboard templates can be added for easy and quick consumption.

I've used the solution for more than ten years.

This can be easily scaled. They have 3 editions that start with a Basic, Advanced and an Enterprise edition. Basic provides all essential features like modeling, sharing and optimization. Advanced will give comprehensive features, provides full flexibility of method and access control. Enterprise addition is complete stack, provides full configurability and integration capabilities.

Customer service and support are flexible and help to guide you through simple queries. If you are implementing the first time, they can assist. For complex implementations, you can always count on them to meet your needs.

Positive

I have used various other solutions as well. However, ARIS BPA provides 200+ model types that give me the flexibility to use different models depending on the context.

The initial setup was not that complex; we could manage it with an installation guide. ARIS Connect is plug-and-play. It is a SaaS offering.

We have implemented everything in-house.

ARIS BPA provides complete suites when it comes to the discovery, design, and analysis phases of implementation. Therefore, the cost it has is just not for modeling. The licensing models are very innovative. You can go with whatever it suits to your organization. The environment starts with basic and moves on to advanced and up to an enterprise-level offering.

I have evaluated multiple other options before selecting ARIS BPA, however, I would prefer not to disclose the product names.

We use it for creating a structured record of our processes and for updating them. We also use it to analyze how strategic changes in our company may impact these processes. 

We work with the cloud solution. We don't have to have anything installed on our computers locally. We designed the processes and the framework ourselves.

With ARIS: 

• We now have a better view of how everybody works in our organization and it helps us to see that everybody is doing the work they should be doing.
• We have more standardization, compared to when we first started, when it comes to describing processes. When we started, we saw that different people in the same unit, who should be doing the same work, performed their work in different ways. ARIS enabled us to achieve more alignment there.
• The solution also makes it easier to solve problems, and similarly helps when there is a strategy change or a new product. It's easier for us to pinpoint where the differences will be, compared to the current way things are done. It helps us respond more quickly to things we change in the organization.

The last point helps us to identify where we have to focus when things change. There are no surprises. We know what our processes are now and, if we know where we are heading with the changes, we can use ARIS to see where the changes need to be made. It helps us to speed up the rollout of transformation processes.

It has also definitely helped us to save time on business process analysis. It's now easier to find processes. We have them clearly described and we don't have to work through a pile of Word or PowerPoint documents. We just go to ARIS and we can search and navigate in the system. It's easier to access things. We are now doing more work with the same number of people, without these people having too much on their plates. We're more efficient and we all benefit from each others' best ways of working.

A basic feature that most other tools like ARIS BPA have as well, is a database with all of the relationships in the system. It makes it easier to have more standardized processes across the organization. The database also makes it possible to run reports and do analysis, which is kind of cool.

What also makes it good is the way we have set it up so that we not only have the processes in place, but we also have relationships specified with our IT systems and our organizational chart. That makes it possible to analyze things from the systems point of view and regarding the organizational part of the company. It all comes together in one tool and that is what gives us the most value at the moment.

We use the modeling technique called BPMN, which is a standard way of describing processes. It's independent of ARIS, but ARIS facilitates working with it. All the objects are available in ARIS, which makes it quite intuitive. For me, ARIS BPM is easy to use because I have known it for quite a long time. Others need some training before they can use it properly. They need a basic understanding of how the tool works. But overall, the intuitiveness of the solution is quite good.

Also, access to the solution is good because it's a cloud solution, and the performance is quite good. It's well-organized.

There are reports available in ARIS and you can modify them a bit if you want something more specific, but it's not that easy to adjust them and make modifications. It would be nice to have some kind of tool to do that, something that is more user-friendly for people who are not too technical, so that they could create reports the way they want them. That would be a good feature. That would also help in the adoption of ARIS.

At this company, I have been using ARIS BPA for a year and a half, but I'm quite experienced in using the tool, having used it for about 10 years.

The stability of the solution is quite good. I haven't had any issues with it. Maybe years ago it was less stable, but it's quite stable now.

We don't have that many users, so it perfectly suits our company. ARIS enables you to start small and grow the use of the solution over time, although it's quite expensive. So if you want to start small, it's quite an investment for a small company. But it's perfectly suitable for growing.

I am the administrator of the solution and we only have a subscription for 10 other users and two other designers.

We have used it very extensively over the last 18 months, but due to our strategy for growth, which is a little bit different, and because of what the pandemic has caused, we are not really growing the process area. We may have even turned it down a bit. That's a shame, but we have to focus on other parts of the organization at the moment.

The technical support is quite good. I have had a few interactions with them by email. There are formalities to the process. I have to put my issues in a certain format and then they will respond. 

It might be easier if I could have direct contact, just easily pick up the phone or chat or just write a quick email, so that we could find a solution. There might be some room for improvement there.

Positive

When I started here, we didn't have anything other than descriptions of processes in Word on PCs around the organization. We wanted to have that available in a more structured way.

I have a good deal of experience in setting up an ARIS environment, so I knew quite well what I needed to do. For me, it's not really that complex. We set it up for our needs.

We had it ready within one month, approximately. It's quite important to think about what you want to have, which areas you want to touch, and what you want the results to be. 

It's important to take some time to do a good implementation of the tool. Our implementation strategy involved investigating, defining, and describing what we wanted to have; what we wanted to describe with the tool, and what benefit we wanted from the tool. In that way, we could set it up, from the start, in a way that we wouldn't have to rework it in a few months or a few years. It's better to take some more time to set it up well than to start in with it directly and then see, in a few months, that you're missing some parts.

I created a framework in which we could capture all of the processes across the organization, from IT to delivery to logistics to HR and finance. Gradually, we have been filling it. We have defined five layers of detail. I interview people who are working with the various processes in the field, and I try to describe them as they are right now. When there are changes within our organization, when we have a new product or we have a new strategy, we also look at the processes and see where these changes will impact them. Based on where the impact might be, we can more easily pinpoint what we need to do when adopting a new strategy or a new product.

There is not that much work involved in maintenance of the solution. The maintenance of the content, on the other hand, depends on the business you're in. For us, it's our day-to-day work, making sure that all the processes are in place and correct. But the maintenance of the tool itself, the more technical part, does not require that much work, about half a day per week.

I did it myself. Because of my experience, I didn't need other people to help me with it.

The ROI depends, for our company, on how big we grow. The intention is to grow and we need a tool in place, like ARIS, to make our growth happen. We have to be in control and we need an overview and insights. If we can achieve the growth we're thinking about, the return on investment should take a few years.

In the future, ARIS might help us save on development costs associated with business process transformation. At the moment, we just describe the business processes without going too much into detail regarding the technical IT solutions. That connection is there, but not too extensive at the moment. But if we improve that part, we will definitely see some cost savings there.

If you want customized reports in place and you cannot create them yourself, you have to get them done externally, so that would be an extra cost.

We briefly looked around at what was in the market, but with my past experience with ARIS, the choice was quickly made to use this tool. It might be a bit more expensive, but it has a lot of possibilities, so we didn't spend very long searching for other tools.

If you start working with ARIS, first investigate very well what you want to achieve. You can use it for different kinds of goals. You need to know what you have and what you want to achieve. Then you have to create a setup. So the requirements are quite important to the design, before you start working with the tool. That's the most important thing you need to do.

The tool functions quite well and you can put every process in it, but it's also important to look at your organization and make sure that people are willing to work with processes. That means you have to do some educating, in addition to the technical solution ARIS provides. Be sure that all the management positions participate in describing their processes and that managers encourage their teams to work in and use ARIS, and to do their work in the way things are described. There are these kinds of change-management issues to be aware of.

The fact that ARIS has the largest BPM community worldwide is not that important to me, because I don't use it very much. I only use it to pose some technical questions. I have used some other frameworks, such as the eTOM APQC Frameworks. So I generally get my knowledge from other sources, rather than from the ARIS community.

When I came into the company, I immediately started to implement ARIS, so I don't have a clear view of how things were done before. But everybody in our organization is more and more aware that we should use ARIS and that we are benefiting from it, although I can't clearly define the benefit compared to how things used to be.

I'm very happy with the ARIS solution. The ARIS Advanced product we have would work quite well for most of the companies. A very big company, like a multinational, might want to have something that is on-premises, and to customize it a little bit, but for most companies, what we have is good enough.

I work at a beverage manufacturer. We use ARIS BPA to design and publish our core processes.

ARIS BPM has helped us speed up our business process transformation by centralizing everything instead of everyone working within a silo. I can't say precisely, but if I had to take a wild guess, I would say that it has sped up our transformation by about 10 to 15 percent. At the moment, it hasn't saved us much time. It has the potential to save us time in the future by giving us a firmer basis to work from. However, we're not saving time on analysis at this stage. ARIS provided a solid basis for our company to manage its assets and by that, I mean its processes. It also helps our customers to have a Single Source of Truth for processes and related information.

The two most valuable aspects of ARIS BPA are the shared common repository and the whole governance cycle. The shared repository allows for cross-functional cooperation instead of doing things in a silo. You can operate cross-functionally and really work end-to-end, instead of dividing everything up on a functional basis. The governance element is important because functions can be managed in a controlled manner. There is a stacked database, and we can move things in a controlled manner from the development environment to the publication environment.

The standard out-of-the-box solutions for modeling are not so good. You have to do some configuration to make it easier and more user-friendly. There are a lot of options, so that can get confusing, but if you filter some things out, then it's easier to use. After you customize it, the end-user has an easy toolset to work from. Another feature I would like to see is the complete visualization of the connect portal.

I've been using it since around 2018, but I think my company has been using it longer.

ARIS is scalable but costly. You can start small and grow the solution over time, but you have to demonstrate the benefits to the leadership before scaling up. Otherwise, it's a one-off, and we aren't looking for a one-off. We're looking for sustainable solutions. Therefore, it's important for us to start small, show the benefits, and then expand.

I would rate Software AG's support six out of 10. It depends on who is providing the support. If you are dealing with support engineers in the Netherlands, it's okay. However, if they refer you to a shared service center, they usually don't know enough to give you proper support. 

Neutral

We purchased the license for ARIS a long time ago, but the central team was dismantled. We revived it back in 2018. Deployment wasn't too easy. We didn't have a maturity roadmap in place, so we were building it step by step. I wasn't able to see the end state or the steps we needed to go through to grow more mature. I'm not blaming Software AG for that. That's just how it went. The deployment process wasn't intuitive or transparent in terms of the next steps we should take. It was also complicated by the fact that our needs as a customer changed from month to month and year to year.

ARIS is quite expensive.

I've previously used QPR. I would say the advantage of ARIS is that it offers more possibilities, but it's also a more complex and costly solution. 

I rate ARIS BPM six out of 10.