ARIS BPA Reviews

ARIS BPA was underutilized because they used the ARIS modeling paradigm, including value-added chains, EPCs, and functional allocation diagrams.

ARIS BPA is coming up with a centralized repository of local business processes that could be referenced for design work and operations.

The most valuable features of ARIS BPA are the centralized repository and the automatic rendering of diagrams.

ARIS BPA’s usability could be improved.

I have been using ARIS BPA for almost three years.

I rate ARIS BPA a nine out of ten for stability.

ARIS BPA’s initial setup was straightforward.

ARIS BPA is too costly from a licensing perspective. It is also too costly to maintain, configure, and integrate.

I am using the latest version of ARIS BPA. Do your due diligence to ensure that this is the product you need from a feature and cost perspective.

Overall, I rate ARIS BPA a seven out of ten.

ARIS has many modules starting right from strategy to dashboarding. However, the primary focus of using ARIS is for Business Process Modeling/Analysis - although it is not just limited to process but can cover the entire enterprise architecture for an organization.

We have used ARIS for multiple projects with different objectives, including E2E process modeling, managing IT application landscape, support for eTOM frameworks, managing risk/compliance, rules modeling, et cetera. 

We have leveraged it for multiple client engagements with different objectives of the program, including digital transformation journeys, IT landscape rationalization, process transformation, process improvement, process automation, S4/HANA Migration, process rationalization, legacy modernization, and much more.

ARIS provides the basic foundation for any digital transformation an organization decides to take. 

Firstly, it helps to create the business blueprint for any organization. With clear and complete documentation of the processes, different departments and people involved can build a common understanding of processes. It helps in reducing duplication since there is only one single source of truth across the organization. 

It greatly reduces the modeling effort of the processes since it is based on a relational DB which supports the concept of library objects. For example, you can create a central repository of applications, risks, data, products, capabilities, services, interfaces, technical infrastructure et cetera. You can create them once and reuse them multiple times as required along with your processes. This helps the multiple dimensional analysis of your processes. 

ARIS provides many functionalities and capabilities, including:

1. E2E visibility of the processes which are typically cross-functional

2. Multiple hierarchies of the process provides a different level of abstraction

3. Multi-dimensional view of the process can be created to further support analysis from the system, data, capability, product, interface, infrastructure et cetera.

4. Provides a single source of truth for a process consumed by different departments/functions

6. Strong governance and release cycle management with a built-in workflow

7. Process simulation capabilities to perform what-if analysis

8. Seamless collaboration using built-in mini workflows 

9. Out-of-the-box connectivity with SAP

Although ARIS is already a leading tool in the BPA space for years, in my opinion, there are a few areas that can be made even better, For example:

1. The reporting capabilities and the ability to create custom reports need to be simplified and made easy so that people even with a good functional understanding of the tool can leverage it to create their own custom report. Since, at the end of such BPA/BPM implementations, higher management typically wants to see the value coming out of ARIS and all the modeling effort and this would make it more adaptable for our customers as they would see the value coming out of the tool.

2. As the world is going the way of low code/no code, they should also think of modernizing the report creation in a similar fashion.

3. The integration capabilities with other COTS products should be better. Since every organization uses many applications/systems for day-to-day operations, the easy integration with such systems like SNOW, SFDC, et cetera, will make the adoption easy for the client rather than seeing ARIS as a standalone system with separate license and maintenance costs.

I've used the solution for 12+ years.

The ARIS SaaS offerings are very stable and secure since they are hosted on Azure and AWS platforms which provide state-of-the-art hosting. 

With the SaaS offering, organizations can start exploring the basic functionalities with a subscription-based license. The license can be upgraded and the adoption of the tool can be increased within the organization as needed.

They offer excellent support and customer service. 

Positive

We have used many tools, including Signavio, Bizagi, Visio, Nimbus, Mega, et cetera.

I personally found the modeling very easy to start and adopt even for a beginer as ARIS provides a very clean and simple interface to work with. 

The kind of versatility and flexibility that ARIS provides is unmatched by any other tool in the market.

The initial setup is quite straightforward since the Software AG teams take care of the provisioning and intial setup of the SaaS instance based on the requirements. 

Organizations do not need to get involved and invest time and energy in figuring out the infrastructure, security, and access-related issues.

The SaaS offering was handled by the Software AG team itself.

Although not quoting a number, ARIS brings huge value for Organizations that have implemented it. For example, it's bringing E2E transparency of how the business process works in a department/unit since they are typlical cross functional in nature.

Different stakeholders can talk and understand the same language since ARIS provides a single source of truth for processes across the organization. 

Although the largest customer base for ARIS is in large enterprises, the SaaS offering from Software AG starts right from free trial to basic, advanced, and Enterprise versions. Organizations can start small and rapidly scale as required.

We looked at many tools, including Signavio, Bizagi, Visio, Nimbus, MEGA, et cetera.

Since there is a free 30-day trial, I certainly urge anyone looking to invest in process modeling or analysis tools to try out ARIS.

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 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.

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.

ARIS was used to capture current business processes in ARIS EPC through a series of workshops. Level 1-3 VACD, Level 4 EPC (Event-driven Process Chain) and FAD (Function Allocation Diagram), Activities, Roles, Metrics, Risk and Control, RACI, etc.

It was used to operationalize new business processes and also in preparation for a case management system migration to Salesforce. The management, team leader, and staff were trained to read the EPC process model and taught how to navigate ARIS in the production environment. 

The selection criteria for ARIS as the preferred BPM was questionable in my opinion.

The main reason it was chosen is that it was on the government "approved" product list.

The solution was too complex/advanced for the organization's requirements and a big team was hired to manage the administration of ARIS and maintain it.

The choice to model the business process in EPC instead of BPMN was made by the organization and no fault of ARIS; ARIS is most certainly capable of modeling in BPMN. There's a lot of time and effort spent to help staff get their head around how to read an EPC in ARIS.

The EPC modeling is very detailed, the semantic check is helpful, and auto-layout simplifies the formatting.

The process interface is valuable for identifying the upstream and downstream processes.

The approval process for the ARIS EPC from the design, staging, and production environment is pretty good. You can obtain feedback on the process model; however, this functionality seems a bit limited by today's standard as some other BPM allows you to comment on the objects within the process model, which makes gathering feedback and making changes easier.

ARIS EPC & FAD features and functionality does not feel like they are not designed for business users. Instead, it feels like they are geared for Process Modelers and Technology users who are focused on System Interface, User Interface, Risk and Control, etc.

Trying to read an EPC in a screen Top-Down while dragging the screen is next to impossible. 

The model graphics can be exported in PDF, but the model is too small to read.

In my experience, once the organization creates the process model in ARIS EPC, it will take approximately two years before most organizations ditch any effort to update it. It takes more effort to maintain it than the value that an organization gets out of it.

The requirements for events after the rules, whilst accurate, simply take up too much space and makes the process model difficult to read.

Connecting the upstream and downstream process interface is a pain.

The auto-layout is a great feature but does not work as expected all of the time, as lines appear to overlap and can be confusing to read unless you click on the line to highlight it.

We have been using ARIS BPM for two years.

It's pretty stable, at 95% in my experience. There was the odd occasion when the system was down and it took 48 hours to resolve the issue.

More licenses can be added as the demand grows, it just costs more.

Visio was used initially prior to ARIS. Visio lacked the BPM functionality.

It was implemented through an ARIS vendor and the level of expertise was good.

I would suggest trying at least three vendors and obtain written quotes.

The setup cost and pricing depend on the license (Modeler, Viewer, Administrator).

ARIS was the only government "approved" software that the organization was "allowed" to purchase. This was a questionable decision.

My advice is to try different BPM providers and download the demo for 30/90 days to see if it meets your organization's needs. A basic tool means that you will outgrow it quickly, whereas top-end solutions may be too costly and difficult to implement.

Our customers have generators on their facilities, and we manage those generators to provide services to the grid and reduce their costs. It involves peak shaving and that sort of stuff. We use ARIS BPM to essentially automate the communication to the grid and the generator and then update all of the account information regarding those transactions.

The ease of use is the most valuable. I have tried a number of BPMN packages, and I find the user interface of ARIS BPM easier and more intuitive than others. If your team is knowledgeable on BPMN, it is really pretty easy to figure out on your own because it adheres to the standards extremely well. I have tried Bizagi, BizFlow, and a variety of such solutions, and I just liked ARIS BPM better.

I use it strictly for developing the business process model. I don't use it for the actual automation. I do that with Vtenext. I have standardized on Vtenext, and I don't use ARIS BPM anymore. The Vtenext UI is just as good, and it is much more tightly coupled to the underlying object model. I can get more done in one session with Vtenext rather than first going to ARIS BPM, then importing, and having to edit it for tight coupling.

I have been using ARIS BPM off and on for six months.

I would not comment on this because we use it primarily just for the business process modeling and not the automation. So, I really can't comment on scaling. We have four users who are using this solution.

We never contacted them. Its user interface is good and pretty intuitive. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We implemented it through an in-house team.

I would recommend ARIS BPM depending upon the use case. I would generally recommend Vtenext first. I found Vtenext on GitHub as I was looking through and trying out lots of BPMN and BPA stuff. I used their product, and it is a really good product. We've now partnered with them.

I would rate ARIS BPM an eight out of ten.

The process modeling capabilities are what we use this for primarily.  

ARIS is probably the most mature product I know of in terms of modeling an enterprise architecture so that it has context. When you need to make changes to processes, there is a view where you can actually see what other processes within different use cases or different functional areas use the same process and what those changes can affect. Workflows can be used across different business areas and that gives a really good, holistic view of what modifications end up affecting.  

Some of the interactions with different versions of browsers caused a little bit of angst because there are certain corporate SOEs (Standard Operating Environments), which do not lend themselves well to representation in the latest version of ARIS. The product is sort of one version behind with current trends, typically.  

I have definitely seen better UIs, but the crux of why we use the ARIS process modeler is because we have everything all one suite. When you talk about enterprise architecture, application architecture, process architecture, or whatever else you want to model and monitor, these processes are all in the same place. You can make cross-references or create links between processes, you can link part of a model to an application, you can link to a capability view, et cetera. As an enterprise architecture tool, there is probably very little they can improve on at least compared to other modelers.  

Because you keep on working with different versions of a model, the only way to maintain a record is to take a snapshot. Certain things are still in design or still in the conceptualization stage. Other things have already gone into production. At a glance, it is quite hard to work out which processes are at a particular stage. The overview is very flat. Having some form of a hierarchy in terms of approvals or a sort of ranking would be good. This could show whether a process has been deployed or not, or if it is still just a conceptual model. Some sort of formal approval process that defines a released version of your models could be incorporated into the workflow approval process to help visualize what stage a process is in.  

I have probably been using ARIS (Architecture of Integrated Information Systems) BPM (Business Process Management)for about four years now. I used ARIS BPM before coming to this company, but quite a while ago. That was about a year ago, and that was version 10 or 11 or something in that range.  

Stability is very much dependent on the network. If the network is not so good, then you might experience some stability issues. It would be good if you had an offline version or some means of caching development. I am not sure whether that is in the ARIS roadmap. 

All BAs (Business Analyst) use ARIS, especially for process modeling. We have a team of probably 50 people who use ARIS modeler to see the process flows, but there are different roles. I am an architect so I can see everything. BAs can only view or read, they can not contribute to the capability models. The roles help scale out so the right people get the appropriate access without causing development issues.  

We have our own administrators here who maintain the product.  

The initial setup and installation are very straightforward. The administration is a bit clunky because of the way it is set up as a Software-as-a-Service. There was not really a Single Sign-On capability for the tool. You have to maintain your login separately and that is a little archaic.  

Because it was already running, there was not really a deployment to get me going with the product. It was just a matter of adding me as a user.  

I definitely recommend the product to users seeking this kind of solution, especially for the architecture practice. If you want to have a knowledge base or a repository for architects it is very good for an overview of the enterprise architecture. Normally in a new business venture — that being a business case, a new software offering, or a new capability — the new process needs to be introduced to an existing architecture. Companies will already have a mature backend with legacy applications and integrations. It is good to keep a repository of the development to make sure that the history of that evolution stays within the company's knowledge base for later reference.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate the ARIS BPM solution overall as a product as probably an eight-out-of-ten. It is not rated higher because the user interface is not as modern as other modeling tools like Bizagi, which looks nice. With ARIS you are quite limited when it comes to the look and feel.  

That issue with look-and-feel becomes more important when you try to present something to executives. When it looks like your ten-year-old has done something to present in grammar school, it is not the right thing to be showing at a high-level meeting. The content is all there, but it just looks like it is just scraped together rather than properly designed.  

We use it for enhancing systems. 

The solution is user-friendly and easy to use. 

They should make improvements as per customer requirements. 

I have been working with Aris BPA for three years.

It is a highly stable solution. 

It is a scalable solution. One hundred users are using the solution. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It does not require much maintenance. 

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.