Bizagi Reviews

Basically, it is a kind of approval mechanism for financial budget reviews. Every year, each department of the functional unit verticals gets some budget. On top of the budget, they will submit the expenditure. All the expenditures will route to the right reviewers upon approval. It will be routed to the financial department for further clearance.

It is open source. That is the main advantage, and it does not require any kind of license. For small and mid-range requirements, we can go ahead with Bijacki. Compared to Bonita and Camunda, there are not many basic workflow orchestration modalities. That is their selling point. It is definitely a cost-saving and time-saving solution. It improves visibility and quality, and basically, it avoids human errors.

We primarily use the solution for remediation in the context of bank remediation programs. We have workflows and different cases our analysts have to deal with. The cases go through various workflow stages, and each analyst can enter at different stages to work with the case throughout the process.

We don't have non-technical personnel, such as business users, using the solution's Live Processes feature to automate and launch simple processes. We have a developer who is in charge of that. From a user experience point of view, we have over 200 users leveraging the platform. 

The solution is deployed on-prem and mounted in a private Azure cloud. Inside the cloud are VMs, one used for a server and another as a jambox; everything is stored in the server. It's perfectly secure and isolated from the internet.

The solution helped our clients, as we can use Bizagi to execute processes for them and produce revenues from that. 

Bizagi reduced our time to market; we developed the solution in a few months, and then we were ready to execute processes.  

Bizagi helped free up employees to do more valuable work. We could do some of the same tasks with Excel spreadsheets, but it would take much longer. Bizagi affects the user experience by minimizing the time spent on databases and enabling more participation in an ongoing live process.

I am a professor at a university. I work with people who have different engineering majors, like computers and electronics as well as master's for ICT management. Most of the time, we use tools like Bizagi, Lucidchart, and IBM Blueworks for modeling, 

Two types of students are using it:

1. The first type of student studies engineering. The degree is more technical, e.g., understanding of flows, BPM, and business process manager notation. I use it for teaching students how to understand icons, basic notation, and utilizing tools, or different roles when understanding the whole organization and how it works. This is more a technical understanding, e.g., teaching them a flow diagram.
2. For an ITC master's degree, post-degree, or something-related, I teach student more about strategy and how to save time: 
   1. optimizing time and resources
   2. modeling a better workflow
   3. modeling better flow for lean thinking
   4. using less documentation and only the documentation that you need
   5. using less technical resources as well as less time and fewer human resources to do the same thing between different departments or areas inside an organization. 

For the master's program, most of the time, it is about how the resources that are linked with the requisite technology are necessary and how, as an ITC manager, they will need to balance between needs, time, money, and all the expenses. For example, you can do this if you go farther than you need to when you model any process inside your organization.

96% of the time, I am just using the modeling part: thinking about a process, the options that I have in mind, or the options that reflect the needs for that organization. It doesn't matter if it is educational or real-world; modeling different scenarios for process roles and responsibilities, time, and communication tools; or when you add some tools and processes that are more complex inside one another. 

As a university, we have an organizational chart that is more like a public office. Then, we have a functional organization. This means that we have the technical and IT staff in one department, the human resources in another, and finance and quality are combined. Most of the time, decisions come from the financial and administrative staff. They were the first functional group working with Bizagi. 

After the pandemic situation, we had more staff and digital tools. I am a leader for the curriculum, proposing new ways and tools to teach. For a master's, that involves a whole line of courses related to the management process, automation, implementation, project management, and service management with IT 4.0. The entire modeling process is easier to integrate with transversal projects, which means that we connect tools and experience from different courses. 

We also sometimes document positive results. For example, in my class, you are explaining how different roles and responsibilities are related in one process for IT 4.0, which is the service management framework that IT uses for different environments that you can represent in the middle of the flow. This is in order to get the key performance indicators for other indexes or indicators for determining your model or reality, when you go from theory to practice, and how the practice is going versus strategy. Whether it involves another subject, other teachers, or another group of students connected with the knowledge, you get not just the theory but also the usefulness of the tool.

Most human beings are visual, thus understanding a fully complex process is harder. When you can represent a logical flow with a lot of variables, such as human resources, technical resources, and some specifications for the time of response that you need for every step, then it makes your planning, strategy, monitoring, and control easier after you run your strategy. It works for academic purposes, but it has also worked for our curriculum, communications, logical flow, and keeping track of the right plan and flow that you have to do. Then, for academic purposes and our administrative staff, it also works for reengineering and remodeling where it has been useful.

It can be useful, as a tool, to improve your communications and the control of your processes. For example, when you have to explain a process to seven or eight stakeholders who think differently as well as have different experiences in different functional departments, it is not easy. Sometimes you are using a lot of technical terms, and other times, you are dealing with management terminology. The visual representation helps you create a better alignment and understanding for different roles and stakeholders of your workforce.

Connecting stakeholders with processes has affected our operations a lot. For example, we have different providers. Some of them are private and some of them are from the public sector, e.g. Ministry of Education. They have different roles that watch our processes in order to get the high quality accreditation. When you need to document those processes, you can also use the solution's tools to help you better model your processes, communicate, and publish in different formats. It helps stakeholders, especially in the public sector, better understand the inputs, time, resources, and tools needed during your whole process. When they can understand better, you can request more time and funding by providing a better perspective about how everything is organized and planned. 

In most cases, I've been working with financial companies such as banks. Currently, our client is a bank. So, most of the processes we're developing are payments and support processes.

Its capability for integration and orchestration is huge. It supports a lot of languages. If Bizagi doesn't have specific native functionality, we can develop a component for Bizagi. It can integrate and orchestrate a lot of processes with other systems.

In my current project, we have just five or six processes, but in other projects, we have about 20 processes integrating with Bizagi. I know from a colleague that they have a hundred processes.

We are able to adapt processes we have created with Bizagi as our business grows and more processes are automated. That's a huge advantage of Bizagi. It can scale, and we can adapt a lot of processes. We can create new versions, and we can add functionalities, processes, activities, and integrations. It is very easy to adapt the processes we have created with Bizagi as our business grows.

It improved a lot of processes for one of the projects I have worked on. We were able to eliminate papers, translations, and a lot of other things that take a lot of time. Sometimes, we don't have to automate a big process. We can automate a tiny process, but the impact is so big.

It helps to connect stakeholders with processes. I've been working with different companies and users. It has a lot of functionalities focused on the stakeholders. In the case of the projects I've been working on, the stakeholders are continually working with the developers. They tell us their requirements, and in the life cycle of software, they participate in every step.

Most of the time, we get the benefits that we were expecting. We sometimes also have unexpected benefits. When the users get a new version of the process or new functionality, they feel great because they didn't expect that the tool could solve their problems.

It has reduced our time-to-market. It has saved a lot of time. For our processes, we have to create a lot of documents, print them, and get a lot of signs. That's the process of the company. With Bizagi, we could reduce that time by 50%. Previously, we were spending an hour printing, signing, and organizing the paper. With Bizagi automation, the process takes 10 minutes because we just have to click and fill in different fields. The time that we save is a lot.

It has reduced costs for the organization. The cost savings depend on the process. For one of the processes, the cost reduction was 150 million Colombian Pesos (COPS) per month.

It has freed up employees to do more valuable work. It has saved a lot of time spent doing manual activities. The time saved varies from process to process. For the payment process, the time was reduced from 30 days to 10 days.

What I use it for is to map business processes using BPMN 2.0, as much as possible. That includes things like equipment maintenance execution, maintenance planning, and container terminal operations for handling cargo from vessels and warehouses. I'm in the logistics and supply chain industry.

We're using the free version of Bizagi. The different entities I've worked for don't really want to spend money on buying the full thing or integrating it with something else that they have. So we just use it for showing them things at the modeling stage, what a process looks like. We haven't looked at the aspect of automating or simulating from a drawing into a live process. For us, it's just for drawing purposes.

For my previous employer, it brought a little bit more clarity on where we had certain issues with maintenance, especially as they relate to the duration of tasks and the repetition of tasks. It wasn't just Bizagi, it was more the interpretation of business processes using BPMN 2.0. But Bizagi really helped in quickly bringing that information across to senior management.

It has definitely helped us to connect stakeholders with processes, internally. It has brought to life what the processes are. And when presenting our procedures and processes to external stakeholders it is a simple, single tool for them to quickly see and understand what is happening. Of course, we have to draw things simply enough. We can't go down to the nitty-gritty detail, but it has created some clarity for our major stakeholders. We're using it to communicate with different stakeholders, from the terminal director up to the CEO, and it is clear enough for them to see what is going on. They understand the process in its entirety, because of Bizagi. And as it relates to IT, it did bring clarity to them when we went a little bit more into detail.

And with my previous employer, it spurred action on improving business processes, to accomplish the kinds of objectives that were required. Indirectly, it helped improve our time to market because we were more efficient in improving our processes, based on use of Bizagi and it showing us where we had our setbacks and issues. Where I am now, we just started using it, as I switched jobs. By the end of this year, after we use it to really communicate to our key stakeholders, it should help improve our processes.

And in terms of man-hours, it takes less time to draw processes because of the ease of use of Bizagi.

Speaking about the use of Bizagi for process automation in our specific industry, I would say that we have not yet reached that level of automation, and for now, we are just using it for modeling and maybe for doing a few simulations.

Bizagi's integration capabilities have benefited our company's business processes in a smooth manner, but I can't describe it much.

We automate some specific processes from HR, purchasing, investments, etc. I use Bizagi to develop the process documentation according to the VPN. We use the information provided to create automation in another tool, not Bizagi. We use this for modeling and documenting the whole process.

Bizagi is a natural VPN notation compliance tool. I could export my information to another vendor that uses another tool, and they wouldn't have problems importing it. I saw other products they were sending to me, and those products included some additional notations or damage that Bizagi could not read. The natural notation is the best feature of Bizagi because it makes it compatible with other products.

We're using it for cooperative business processes. For instance, if you work with IT and you want to request access to a specific database, you make the request using Bizagi and create a ticket. Similarly, for many other processes, when you want to request access to a system or to a physical area in the building, you use Bizagi.

It's a company requirement because I work for a large French and Brazilian insurance company. I work supporting over 2,700 active users and developing new processes.

Since 2018, we have registered approximately 68,000 tickets on Bizagi. There are actually more than that, as those are just the queries in one database, not all of them.

It has helped free up employees to do more valuable work. We hear that from our inside customers that we develop processes for. It helps save time for our employees.