ARIS BPA Reviews

I use ARIS BPM mainly for implementing company policies and legislation to capture processes. I try to use ARIS as a single point of truth, connecting it to a library or source systems to strengthen its use cases, as acknowledged by higher management.

The maintenance capabilities of ARIS BPM and the strong underlying database are particularly valuable. It provides strong impact analysis features compared to other tools, such as Visio and PowerPoint, which are not comparable. Initially, ARIS was a standalone product but now benefits from cloud deployment, which enhances access and distribution across my organization.

We have used the platform to describe purchases and the organizational structure in the company.

I personally use it at home as well as in the company. I received a key for the application, which I won based on a competition when version 7 of ARIS was being tested. I sent in some test cases where I had several failures during that test.

My organization's market is only in the Czech Republic. We don't have any experience using the solution globally.

I like working with ARIS because I have some experience with it. I understand what is on the forums. I know how the user interface works, how to create a repository, and stand up this tool.

I am an advanced user. ARIS BPM is intuitive for me because I know the UML, BPMN, and EPC methodologies implemented in this tool. It is very easy to create processes for restructuring a company with some descriptions. 

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.

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.

It's mainly used for our customers. The biggest plus point was interfacing with JDE or SAP. With a click of a button, you can import all the current processes the company is using in your chosen notation.

A definite benefit is that we can do process modeling and what-if analysis. Very few tools can do product analysis for processes well, and ARIS is definitely in the top two or three for that.

Surprisingly, it can handle almost all the business processes you can think of, from CRM and finance to HR and data development. I've used it for almost everything.

It's okay for a small team. It could be better, but for large teams, it might not be scalable enough. You might need to consider other options then.

We have three main use cases. The first is that ARIS is our central repository to document our standards, meaning our business processes, our organization, our data, and our IT capability landscape. 

The second use case is to manage our application landscape. We have all the applications that we use inventoried in ARIS, about 3,000 of them. It's used to manage all the information related to those applications, such as where an application is used, how many users there are, what the current version is, as well as the contracts connected with this application and who the product or solution owners are.

The third use case is process mining. We are using ARIS to reconstruct a process as it has been effectively executed and to automatically calculate some key performance indicators.

In my previous company, we used ARIS to document local processes in different countries. It helped us to identify what were the main differences in terms of processes, identify best practices, and give visibility to everyone in the company into what those best practices are.

ARIS gives us a place where we can have a single source of truth. Instead of having business processes documented in different software, in Word or in PowerPoint, and described in different ways, ARIS provides a framework and a central repository where we can find that single source of truth. It gives us a consistent content structure for all processes. This is something that is very valuable. In that way, indirectly, it saves us time when looking for that single source of truth.

It's an enterprise application that is used by many people across our organization: the business process owners, the data owners, and the IT owners. And they are enriching the content. It is also used by anyone in the company who wants to look at our standards.

The solution has also provided us with capabilities we didn't know we needed until we had them. One of the functionalities that I really like is the ability to use ARIS for application portfolio management. In addition to our applications, we have also stored, in ARIS, the footprint of where those applications have been implemented. That means we know in which country a given application has been implemented. With embedded geolocation, we have a very visual world map, where we can see the footprint of each application.

We use BPMN for process design. We check our processes. There is the start event, then there are the tasks and steps as well as risks on the steps and controls. In the end, there is a result event of the process. There is a hierarchy model through the processes themselves to locate, classify, and build a whole tree off of the complete process design. So, we try to get the complete process model in all the layers. It is not only about flow diagrams. You also need the hierarchy system in the process design to get an idea of which business area it is, which products we handle there, etc. This is to get some kind of a systematic approach to a wide area of the complete company, e.g., which services are delivered from whom and how it is organized.

We separated the fields. We had some kind of internal control system, which was one use case for us. We had risk management and how to get a picture up of the actual risk evaluation. We had the policy management separated. We started process management. This is all integrated on the technical side and the tools' side. We tried to get the different solutions out of the one system to see them as different solutions with different responsible people with different roles behind them. 

It fits all together, so there are no completely loose ends, where there is one philosophy and one architecture behind it. We managed to get it a little bit separated, but it has good connection process management, internal control systems, and a risk system. It is very well-integrated.

We are using Connect and ARCM. ARCM is the ARIS governance, risk, and compliance module to do workflow-orientated stuff, e.g., how much is your risk.

Another use case is value chain processes. These are in a hierarchy built up through the company and our business use cases since we have export and capital market services. At the bottom, we decided to use only a business process model notation (BPMN), which made it possible for us to integrate on this flow chart. This integrates risks and controls directly on a flow chart, making it easier for non-super process experts to get an idea of the steps, controls, and risk as well as how this all fits together to get a good overview at the starting point when working with these processes.

In normal, day-to-day business, when a process is drawn, our expert team can review the processes, risks, and controls. They can do that completely themselves on a technical level. There is a review step from the process expert to her/his boss, then it is approved and published. After that, we use the risk evaluation and control execution using ARCM Risk and Compliance Manager, where they can do everything with the risk, e.g., how much is our risk? How much is the risk now? They evaluate that and do a controlled execution. We use the ARIS APG programming to get the approval and publication processes. 

Now, we have a fully automatic-supported risk evaluation each quarter. I only need to take the results and put them together for the board's report. That is a big improvement. 

The implementation of the completely decentralized process management, meaning that business departments can simply document their processes and flowcharts to improve their businesses, is now in one system. They have a list of business applications that are used within the process documentation, where there is one list of organizational departments interacting within this process. It has everything that we normally would want to have if we use an integrated process management system that works fine. Therefore, we have possibilities that we did not have before. 

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.