ARIS Architect and Designer Reviews

We use ARIS to design and publish all our company processes and produce detailed job descriptions of all employees. The content in ARIS is highly detailed, including our modeling processes. Everybody can generate their job description. We create process manuals that provide a detailed description of a process.

We also get several reports from the solution. For example, there's a questionnaire about people who work together. HR needs to know who works with whom, and ARIS helps us generate a detailed report so HR can send information to individuals who are working together. These reports are based on the processes we have designed in ARIS,  and we update them yearly.

ARIS has helped to save time on business process analysis. It takes us half the time it used to take.In addition, it's very easy for our organization to adapt to any change. Those changes might not be a full transformation, but it's easy to adapt our processes. ARIS makes it easy to evaluate the effect of the changes and decide how to apply them to our processes. At the moment, ARIS doesn't directly affect our customers, but we are trying to design our customer experience processes in ARIS. We also plan to connect our customers to our internal processes. After that, we can also analyze the effect of a change on our customer experience through our internal processes.

It is effortless to examine cause and effect in ARIS. For example, if a department needs to split into sub-departments, we can analyze their job descriptions and see where the split should start and end. It has also made people think about and understand processes, not just their particular tasks. They can easily see their internal customers through the processes, which means they can see the effect of their tasks on those customers. 

We are also integrating our process system into other systems, like our GRC, so our risk management team can match their risks to the processes inside ARIS. That will help them understand and correlate risks with processes and process flows. We have process KPIs that we measure through the system, helping people understand how to change processes to improve their KPIs. They can understand this information by looking at the system rather than documents. When you look at a text description, it's not easy to see all the connections and exceptions. It can be hard to understand the process design. With ARIS, it's straightforward to follow the process design to understand the process itself.

The most important feature is ARIS's ability to turn a process design into data to analyze anything you want. For example, we have some analysis reports in ARIS that can guide us when we want to change a system. It shows us how this change will affect all of the organization's processes. That is the most useful part for us. You can define your own meta models in the system by taking something from the out-of-the-box features and customizing it according to your needs. This is another valuable part of the solution. 

It also enables you to publish content to users based on privileges so that a group of people can access content easily and generate their own reports. In terms of user-friendliness, there are three different levels. The first one is the end-user, and it's very user-friendly for them. The second is the web designer part, and that is also user-friendly. The third part is the advanced designer part called ARIS Architect. It has more features, making it a little bit more complex to use and adapt to and a little less intuitive than the other parts.

The simulation part still has some way to go. It's a good feature, and it's something that other vendors don't have right now, but it can still be improved. Some features are needed in ARIS Architect, so advanced users can do things through drag-and-drop functionality. There is still some coding needed for some of this. I'm still trying to understand the process mining capabilities, and they are improving, but they still need some work in the context of the on-premises product.

We've been using ARIS Architect and Designer since 2017.

I always tell people not to use the latest version of the ARIS product. I think it still applies because the software doesn't provide any patches for the system. They just give you another version. They're saying they are changing other things with these new versions, but sometimes they change something we don't want to change. We want something to be fixed, but they give us these pieces instead. They are just providing us with new changes that we don't want.

It is not applicable for us for every version update. For example, we are still waiting for our version update because they removed the Turkish language in the latest version through the package. Maybe they released a version one or two months ago. I'm not aware of that, but we were waiting for an updated version that somebody would test and find problems with. So, this is how it goes with that.

I think it's highly scalable, but it consumes a lot of CPU resources. We have to explain to the IT department why it consumes so much resources. I think that's not a technical problem, but it would be better to have some more documentation to prove our case to IT. I would not say it allows us to start small. We started at the middle level then went up to large or extra-large.

Over the last year, their support has gotten better. But it is not easy to find someone in person through a remote connection. You need to do everything through email. It isn't easy to explain everything in emails. I understand that they need the basics, but sometimes it is much easier to connect to the system and see what's going on. Getting to that stage takes time with Software AG, but it has improved over the last year.

Positive

I haven't used any other international BPA solutions, but I have used local ones. We also used Visio. It's hard to compare ARIS and Visio. They're not on the same level.

I was involved in the initial setup of ARIS in our organization. I was actually the consultant who sold the product to the company I am now working for. Back then, I was the consultant, and since then, I have come in to head the team. The initial setup of ARIS in this organization was straightforward but complex. The setup documentation does not cover all the features and configurations, and there were times that we needed to ask for support and wait for the answers. Our deployment took about one month, but we didn't work on it every day of the week because of the questions and waiting for the answers from support.

We deployed a test alignment first, which was separate from its database server. That means we needed to create a database for the test environment and then install the test environment. After we had done our tests, we had to do the production part.

Many customers find the licensing configuration confusing. There are many different sub-details in the licensing, making it very difficult for us to understand what we are buying and what we are using with what.

I would rate ARIS Architect nine out of 10. The solution has gotten better in the last year. I was thinking about deducting a point because it is not easy to find someone in person through remote connections. You need to do everything via email, and it isn't easy to explain everything over email. Of course, I understand they need the basics, but sometimes it isn't too easy to connect to the system and see what's going on.

Regarding the visibility and control that ARIS provides of processes throughout our organization, overall, I would say we have "half control." We have control of the processes but not which ones are executed. We only have control of the processes on paper. Of course, the audits go through the documented processes, but we also want to have control of the processes. When it comes to execution, we need to have different models of ARIS.

My advice to prospective ARIS users is to first decide what to do with business processes and then buy a tool like ARIS. It's a potent tool, but it is too expensive if you only want to document your processes. It wouldn't improve the case itself, but if you want to do some real analysis of the processes, I think it is one of the best tools in the market. It provides you with a full view of the processes so you can document them. You can monitor them and improve them through simulation. So, this is a full cycle. It is powerful with different modules, but first, you need to convince yourself that you need a real process analysis.