SAP Signavio Process Manager Reviews

We use it for process management within our organization. It helps us map various processes, such as budget-to-report (B2R), High-to-rate (H2R), and Purchase to Pay (P2P), into SAP. It enables us to maintain an overview of all IT systems involved, allowing us to identify and analyze processes that help streamline across different locations and warehouses, facilitating collaboration and easy sharing of information.

It has streamlined and consolidated processes, offering a holistic view of the PTP process, and leading to the identification of gaps and inefficiencies. This consolidation has allowed a reassessment of supporting systems, potentially leading to their consolidation or elimination for more efficient maintenance. Additionally, it revealed redundant roles, enabling a more streamlined distribution of tasks. The analysis highlighted challenges in data maintenance across multiple systems, emphasizing the need for improved real-time transactions and informed decision-making on system usage and data management.

One of the most valuable features is the consistency across the process model. The drag-and-drop functionality in Signavio is impressive and user-friendly, allowing easy connection to other elements without the need for excessive back-and-forth. The consistency in diagrams and objects permits effortless dragging, dropping, and reuse. Signavio users can efficiently develop and prepare flows without the need for extensive time investment.

An enhancement I would appreciate is broader integration capabilities. Beyond connecting with SAP ERP, the ability to seamlessly integrate with various backend ERP systems, such as Oracle NetSuite or Microsoft Dynamics, would be valuable. This integration should facilitate data retrieval and direct connections to both the process flows and associated documents. An additional feature that would be excellent is the capability to execute database queries or actions directly from within the VPN model. The capability to create a process map and seamlessly initiate actions like generating a sales order, triggering delivery, and managing the pick pack process – all within the VPN model, would be beneficial.

I have been using it for a couple of years.

The stability is satisfactory, and I haven't encountered any issues while working with it. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

It offers good scalability. I would rate it seven out of ten.

Technical support has been somewhat challenging; there hasn't been much visibility on how to create a ticket or integrate with SAP. I would rate it a six out of ten, as there is room for improvement in terms of interaction and integration guidance.

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward.

Introducing a sandbox system tightly integrated with SAP, offering a use case out of the box for a 30-day trial, would allow users to explore and assess the system's advantages. Similar to cloud providers like Azure, and AWS, providing free access for a year, Signavio could offer a 30-day subscription for users to play around and experience real-time benefits with predefined content. This approach would provide a hands-on experience beyond presentations and YouTube videos, fostering better understanding and showcasing the tool's advantages for organizations considering it. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

We use this solution for capturing our workflows and processes in all areas of the business, whether that's HR or content production or finance. It's about discovering some of those workarounds and unblocking our workflows.

With respect to how easy Signavio is to use, that's an interesting one because different roles may look at processes in different ways and to some, the word-defined process is a complete turnoff. From the business analyst perspective, it is really easy to use. They're used to using Visio and modeling tools anyway. When it comes to the collaboration hub use, that took a bit of explaining to start. But again, it's a case of a picture paints a thousand words. Even a process diagram, as you're leading your collaborators through it, it's easier to understand.

To explain one way that this solution has improved our organization, I will use an onboarding process as an example. We were seeing the onboarding processes coming through a number of pieces of work and there were problems in the workflow because the issues were being addressed in individual functions, with HR or particular departmental areas rather than looking at it holistically. The fact that we can model the process end to end from the moment a new person is required for a role right through to that person being in their seat and working at their desk and engage with all the different subject matter experts in the different functional areas, really helped.

Using Signavio supports and enables our business transformation. From a business analysis perspective, we're always looking at the "as is" and the "to be" models. Having all of those workflows and processes documented to understand what we're doing now really helps with moving forward in a positive way.

I like the collaboration and the real-time aspects of it. The way that we captured processes previously started with the drawing of an image using Microsoft Visio. We might have had to have two, three, or four workshops to get to an end process that was usable. Now with Signavio, it's real-time. We might have one workshop to start off and capture the main tasks around a workflow, but then we can comment and update that real-time online and collaborate online. It's really helpful, especially as a team spread across the UK.

The user interface for the collaboration hub is antiquated and should be improved. It feels sort of 90s and I think there is more that can be done with it.

I would like to see more support for targeting efforts in terms of resources. One of the things we've done for ourselves is added an attribute to indicate where the process is from. This means that we can do a bit of a heat map of where we've got processes modeled and where we haven't. This gives us the ability to target particular areas of the business. There could be something more on the reporting side of it for the processes you have captured or processes that might be work in progress to see where to target your effort because you don't always have lots of resources to spare. So it's more around targeted efforts.

We've had Signavio in the business for about eighteen months. We started with a very small team of business analysts using it and then spread that across the BAs embedded in all of the digital products, as well as our studio's BAs. After this, with the Collaboration Hub, we've got all our people who work in the project and program delivery, as well as product delivery, all working together and collaborating.

Stability-wise, it's been fine. We've had a couple of minutes of downtime and when we've rung the Signavio help team, they've been fine and worked with us and it's been back online. There is nothing where I'd say it had an impact on what we were doing.

We started with twelve to fifteen users to begin with and now we're at seventy-eight. We're not in the hundreds or thousands but given the people that do the actual modeling versus the people we collaborate with, we collaborate with a lot more, so we have seventy-eight process modelers in the organization, but then we have two hundred collaborators.

Signavio support helped us with our initial setup and a couple of times when we had issues with downtime. They have always been helpful.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had a few information security issues to work through, which was due to the BBCs level of security and what we require. We've gone through all of that process. Again Signavio was on board and made sure that if we had any questions they'd answer those for us. We had their engineers on any calls with our InfoSec team as well. All of that worked through fine.

There has been time saved, definitely. Getting the monetary value requires additional effort in your process capture because, without the measures on that, process capture is very hard to get to the monetary value of return on investments.

Time is very easy to prove because I can see that from the number of people that would have been in workshops to capture those processes initially and how many times we would have been around that same scenario to do that. However, to get to specific use cases, you need to have the measures around those processes captured at the same time, so that's another degree of capture that you wouldn't have necessarily done in the original process capture, but it's fine. It's doable and then you can get to the monetary value, but we have not done that.

Right at the very beginning, we looked at five different products with Signavio being one of them. We had a list of requirements of what we wanted from our process repository. We went through all five products, had demonstrations of them, did a compatibility and feature matrix against all of our requirements and three came out of that process. Post further demos we had done, Signavio was the choice in the end because it met our business needs.

We do not yet use the process mining and process intelligence functionality, but it is on the roadmap and we plan to do a proof of value this year.

This is a good solution but there needs to be work done on the Collaboration Hub user interface. Also, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as a support tool towards becoming more focused on process management. This high-level goal can be further broken down into increasing visibility over existing processes, facilitating the design and collaboration on to-be processes, as well as cutting down on external consultants costs related to process management. 

Furthermore, we are using Signavio for our enterprise architecture as well, in order to increase visibility over how the different IT systems used in the company are supporting different processes. 

SAP Signavio Process Manager has a strong basis for creating a process organizational structure (process owners, process managers). 

Visualizing and collaborating in one place on all cross-functional processes has led to an increased understanding of how everything connects (especially through the use of previous and subsequent processes, but also through the use of the "call activity" function within the BPMN models). 

The centralized dictionary has further helped with standardization of items such as roles at a global level.

One of the most valuable features was the possibility of not only collaborating with the other system Process Managers and also with non-licensed users (whether Collaboration Hub users or other external users). 

This functionality ("invite anyone for feedback") has substantially increased visibility over work-in-progress when it comes to process modelling and overall process management and it decreased the time spent on giving and receiving feedback through emails and through sharing screenshots/.ppt files/Visio files etc.

The user management functionality in Process Manager is not as user friendly as the one in the Collaboration Hub. The design, although good compare to other solutions on the market, is not as great as that of the Collaboration Hub. 

Furthermore, the integration with SharePoint Online doesn't offer the same benefits as the one with SharePoint classic, meaning that when using the search functionality of "search in content" you will not get results of the text within the SharePoint Online documentation.

I've used the solution for seven months.

We have not experienced many issues (if any) so far, however, we have also only started using this solution.

The product offers good scalability options, especially with the SAP acquisition.

Technical support offers prompt answers from our initial contact (sales representatives) to the consultant we worked with during the setup and training.

Positive

We did use 2c8 Apps, which was not user-friendly enough and didn't offer a cloud solution. It also was difficult to collaborate/share content with the rest of the organization.

The initial setup was straightforward, and although we used Signavio's premium rapid deployment, we could've most likely done it by ourselves.

We implemented the product with the help of Signavio (10 days of consultation efforts).

I am unable to give an answer at this point as we are still only starting to work with Signavio.

There is a rather high cost for the Process Manager licenses, however, costs can go down if there are more modules from the Business Transformation Suite added to the contract. 

We looked at up to 80 other process modelling solution providers. The top 4 vendors were Aris, Adonis, GBTEC, and Signavio.

In our company in healthcare, we right now focus on process documentation in order to build a base for future process improvement and potential automation. We use the Signavio Process Manager to design the processes and publish them on the Collaboration Hub. This adds to the transparency of the business since all employees have access to the Collaboration Hub and see the documented processes as visualized models. This transparency is fostering the collaboration between business units by reducing silo thinking and thus enabling continuous process improvement.

The interface is quite intuitive. I am modeling a lot of processes, so for me, it's quite easy. We don't use the entire BPMN 2.2 notation, but I think it's quite easy to understand. At the same time, we have noticed that it is not that easy for people who are not used to reading processes. I think that you have to have a certain amount of background knowledge before you begin. If you are modeling, for example, it is easy to use if you know how to model processes. They also give you a pre-selection of what you can use, which helps.

My team of four people are the only ones who are modeling processes, so the intuitiveness in terms of being able to model does not help others. However, I think in general, when it comes to understanding our models, this solution empowers people in terms of understanding BPMN. They can use the collaboration hub and see the process, and then they use it in the project themselves. They see what is available and they understand the processes a little bit better.

We have not really used process modeling and automation to this point. We mainly document processes and try to get a better handle on the documentation. This helps us to close the gap between what is documented and how people do their work on a daily basis. At the same time, I think it's a very good framework to dig deeper into data mining, process intelligence, and also workflow accelerator because once you have to have processes, you can build on that. It's the fundamentals.

This solution pretty much enables us to carry out the entire process-improvement lifecycle in a unified hub. However, we also use another model on top of that where we measure how good the process is. We give the users a set of questions for them to rate the processes that we give to them. We use the state model, so based on this agenda, the process falls into one of those six categories. We plan to later do this rating of the processes using a workflow accelerator, but it still needs to be implemented.

An example of how Signavio is improving our business is the Collaboration Hub and the whole idea of collaboration. I see myself when I'm in projects or when I'm modeling processes, it's like a common language that you create. What I see a lot is when people come together, they don't really understand each other. For example, if you have IT people and doctors talking, they live in two different worlds, but somehow if you use this language, you can bridge them and you can bring them together because you have a common understanding. I think that's very helpful. So, if you make it accessible to both of the business units to make it accessible to the doctors and to IT people, they will get interested in putting their own ideas into a process.

With respect to providing our users with all of the tools they need, it depends on which side you're talking about. As editors, it's giving us pretty much everything, although we have to do some workarounds. We have process management and we have document management on top of it. We are using two different systems for this and we have connected them because you cannot do it all with Signavio alone. It is not very user-friendly if the user puts one hundred documents into a single process, so we use a different solution for that, and the users jump onto another system. We are keeping mind, of course, that Signavio is not a document management tool, it's a process management tool. Certainly, I think that our needs are covered right now. We have a big transformation project going on and we do a lot of standardization and process variance, so we have combined them in the architecture. Compared to process mining or process intelligence, our use case is simple, so our requirements are met.

The solution’s collaborative features should in theory help to create a process-centric mindset in our organization, although I think the whole idea of process thinking is a mental level that is above this. Even though people use processes as a common language, they don't always think in terms of processes. I don't know if Signavio can really help with that. The collaboration tools help with collaboration, and that's it. Becoming process-centric is more of a thought management function, where you need to foster the process thinking in general. I don't think that it even needs to necessarily be covered with this tool.

Based on my experience, one of the best features offered by Signavio is its simple Collaboration Hub functions, where users from various departments can constantly refer to in their TO-BE process design. The impact bridging silos with offering transparency is immense, especially in hierarchical organizations like hospitals. Most people feel part of the "process revolution" and some of them are even affected by the "process virus", thus initiating continuous improvement by looking at potentials/low hanging fruits in their own AS-IS processes.

There are two main features I like to see implemented/further developed in the SaaS solution, which would bring a great value to our present business case.

On the first hand, I would like to see the inclusion of some document management functionalities. Even though Signavio focusses on process management, processes are often accompanied by loads of documents. With our current solution, we link the DMS system with Signavio, nevertheless, an embedded solution of DMS with Signavio would certainly bring more benefits and better operability to the overall solution and its end-users.

On the other hand, a more user-friendly solution could be targeted with process standards and process variants compromising the overall process architecture. On the level of the process manager, it would be very convenient if standardized processes / or standardized parts of processes could be treated differently from process variants and be "marked" as such. Especially if standardized process parts are implemented in completely different (end-to-end) processes, a marginal change of the standardized part would be translated in all those other processes, where the standard process part is implemented. In the current status, process modularization needs to be performed, where the standardized parts are linked to from any other (end-to-end) process. On top of this, reports could be drawn to measure the % of standardization across all processes, including also standardized process parts in the analysis instead of just those processes, which are standardized end-to-end.

Overall, the solution offered by Signavio is very stable. We had from time to time some troubles with stability at the beginning, where users couldn't access the Collaboration Hub. However, this was due to the fact that our servers are based in South Africa. Therefore, the source of the problem is the location of the servers, which made communication with the Signavio cloud unnecessarily complicated. In the context of healthcare though, even a short system failure might have a significant impact on our daily business. Since we combine BPM with DMS, our end-users need the Signavio access to retrieve their documents for patient treatment. If the access is denied, we all feel the anxiety level increase (slightly) because our value proposition is addressing people's life and their wellbeing.

The scalability of the product is very impressive. At the end of our transformation project, we gonna have more than 10'000 users accessing the Collaboration Hub. We deploy the product parallel to our Transformation Project (HIT2020) in one clinic after the other and we found that the increasing number of users on the platform is not negatively influencing the software performance. This definitely speaks for the scalability of the software solution and allows us to focus on process management initiatives to support business transformation rather than concentrating on issues concerning software performance.

Since I have a business background and I am not an IT expert, I am mostly not the person speaking directly with the technical support team of Signavio. Nevertheless, most bugs occurring in our daily business are fixed within just a few hours of time. We only experienced two or three issues, where problem-solving took some more time. But in my experience the Signavio support team is always determined to fix our problem as soon as possible, delivering satisfying customer service.

There were different solutions in the pipeline and the final battle was between Signavio and Adonis. One of the decision-makers already knew Signavio and voted for the Signavio solution advertising its usability for both process managers and end-user. In the further decision process, he managed to convince everyone to launch Signavio as the new process management tool.

In general, I think it is very important to understand the/your functionality of process management in a company and its relationship/alignment with business strategy. Based on the visions of where you want to go with process management, the right tool for the missions needs to be chosen.

I personally am very much convinced by the modularized solutions Signavio is offering in one SaaS software package: Process Manager, Process Intelligence and Workflow Accelerator all connected with the Collaboration Hub. If you want to push business transformation forward, want to go into process mining, facilitate process automation and in particular want to strengthen digitization initiatives those requirements are well covered with the Signavio tool.

Although, each company has a different role of process management within their company, a process management's "why", "how" and "what" must be clear from the beginning on. The tool chosen must then fit this strategic direction in order to support the business in their e.g continuous improvement.

Our main use case for this solution is (1) capture current process with Process Manager (2) invite process feedback with Collaboration Hub (3) Process Intelligence/ Process Mining from  SAP Tables for Process Discovery and Process conformance with current process.  The process are modelled to BPMN 2.0 Standard. From there, we are able to analyze the business process and identify improvement opportunities.

This solution has improved our organization in terms of the level of engagement. For example, everybody is more aware of the business process.  

In my experience, the Signavio BPMN view is easier for the business to understand than EPC.

In the old days, we used to run workshops with post-it notes and flip charts, draft the process map and then email the process maps or stick up the draft process maps on the wall for comment. You then collate the comments and modify the process maps which is time-consuming. 

Since Signavio Process Manager is a cloud-based solution, it's way easier. You just invite users to comment on the process map.

The most valuable feature is the collaborative nature of it. If somebody documents a global process then everybody can comment on it, or contribute to the process map, regardless of where their office is.

For myself, I most often use the process manager, which has a friendly user interface.

The Signavio Process Manager is a middle-range solution that is also capable of process simulation and workflow management. Whilst it may not be as strong as other products for certain tasks; For example, simulation-wise, it is probably not as strong as SIMUL8 Process Simulation Software. For complex workflow management, it's probably not as strong as Appian. It represents good value for money with strong performance.

If you wish to build a process-centric business from scratch then I think this product would be ideal.

Signavio has released a newer version of the Customer Journey Map which is way better than the previous version.

4 years.

The stability is absolutely amazing. Up until now, I haven't had anything that I'm not satisfied with. We have not had any downtime since I have been with the company.

In terms of scalability, I have used several of the components and they all seem to be integrated. Everything ties in really well. For example, the decision modeling component is linked to the business process map, which is really good.

We have about two thousand people in our organization, and about three hundred who have been trained to use Signavio.

I'm not aware of any major things for which we had to go back to Signavio. The whole platform just works. The issues are more to do with what happens on our site in terms of, for example, creating the library. How you utilize or re-use the elements is entirely based on the libraries that you have created. If you have five different elements that are all called "Approval process" then it becomes a problem, but that would be an issue of governance.

We were using a fairly old ARIS product and then switched to this solution. The ARIS product was well structured, which is good, but the user-friendliness of Signavio Process Manager beats ARIS hands-down. The ARIS solution is also very expensive.

The switch came about when our ARIS license was about to expire, and we considered upgrading the existing product. Our group of thirty-two people evaluated both the upgraded ARIS product, as well as Signavio Process Manager, and it was put to a vote. The result was a unanimous decision to transition to Signavio.

The initial setup for this solution is very straightforward, especially compared to the ARIS product that we were using. Essentially, when you sign up, they give you the username and your password. You can set up the end users in one day.

The difficulty in setup is not on the Signavio Process Manager side. Rather, it is a question of whether the process architecture has been properly defined for how you want to document the business process. Obviously, that has nothing to do with the product, but you need to have a process architect who is able to set up the process governance framework prior to the process mapping.

There was a period of change management because of our switch from the ARIS solution, so there was training involved, but it was a fairly easy transition.

During deployment, we had one person doing the training, who also helped us translate processes from ARIS to Signavio. We had one person to manage it, and another to help us roll it out.

For the implementation, it was fairly easy and we worked directly with the Signavio consultants.

No comments as I was not involved in the commercial negotiation.

This solution provides good value for the money.

We only evaluated the ARIS and Signavio solutions.

Signavio Process Manager is a very good middle-range product. If you want to have more engagement from your SME, or are just starting out and trying to build a process-centric company, then this solution is ideal. You have all of these components in one product, and it will help you to resolve various issues.

The product itself is brilliant, but you need a strong process architect who can provide governance and the framework as to how the business will need to go about documenting and then maintaining the business processes. You need to have the right expertise within the company. The best software in the world can't make up for this.

While Signavio is quite user-friendly, it can be an issue if multiple people creating the same entity in the dictionary. For example, a subprocess "Approval Process" can be created by different teams and process owners, this is something that has to be managed properly.

If I were given the opportunity to recommend process software for people to use, I would highly recommend this solution based on my experience.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are working to help our customers with manufacturing use cases from areas such as the automotive sector, mechanical engineering, production, and OEMs. Most of the time, it is end-to-end processes.

Our specialty is supply chain management on operational manufacturing, and in this environment, we usually use Signavio to model end-to-end processes.

I would rate the ease of use for this solution at five stars. The customers are more open to actually work with the product and in the product landscape because it's so easy to use compared to other products, where changes and remarks are very intransparent. This is a big advantage to Signavio.

We worked together with Signavio for a customer and six months ago they had nothing. That was a complete greenfield approach. I would say from March this year up to November they began with zero users to now it's a complete 180-degree change. They started from nothing and now everybody's using Signavio, communicating and collaborating and modeling their processes.

With regard to the solution’s integration of process modeling, mining, and automation, we usually get started from a maturity-level point of view. We've got our own framework to independently assess different customers process landscapes, and this is firstly done by our maturity level questionnaire, then intense interviews and workshops, and by having a thorough look at the data documents. It's pretty much hands-on and a lot of talking.

This solution enables us to carry out the entire process-improvement lifecycle in a unified hub, otherwise, we wouldn't use it.

I think that this solution gives our users everything they need in terms of functionality. In my opinion, it's customizable enough that you can realize your own ideas, but it's also standard enough that you don't have to make too many changes.

The usability of Signavio is at a very high level.

The Collaboration Hub, which helps us in terms of being able to communicate with our customers, brings everybody into the tool and close to the process, allowing them to comment and to implement their own processes. That is very important for us because that makes the process-based change really successful for the customer.

Signavio one hundred percent underlines the mind change that is required to implement a successful process landscape.

We very often face situations where Signavio comes to its limits. One of the most important points in Signavio that would be a great change would be the management of variants of the process. This is very unhandy at the moment and what would bring a benefit to Signavio, as well as to the customer, is an even closer integration of the collaboration tools. These are the process manager, workflow accelerator, and process intelligence.

We are using the process manager and the Collaboration Hub.

This is a solution that we deploy for our customers.

I have no worries with respect to stability.

It's always a little work to scale this type of solution. When you start with, for example, two modelers and a handful of collaboration app users, it's very easy to handle. If you scale, you have to think of different aspects like user management or rights and so on. That said, we have had no problem with scalability.

We've implemented Signavio for companies with about one thousand employees. We have also implemented Signavio for a company with fifteen thousand employees and the scaling never was a problem.

I had a situation last year on the 24th of December, which is Christmas Eve in Germany. Usually nobody is working. I had a problem with my workspace and I rang up the support line. One hour later, everything was absolutely fine. That was really the best customer service impression I've ever had.

I personally found out about Signavio about seven years ago and just followed the company, their internal roadmap, and the development. I liked what I saw because they kept the pace over the last six, seven years.

But in general I had worked and I'm still working with different solutions. It's most important that we can work with the tools the customer requires.

From the technical point of view, it's very simple because as soon as you use a cloud solution, you don't have to worry about anything.

From the hands-on and from the working point of view, it might be a little bit difficult if you have never worked with BPMN. However, as soon as you get into it and based on the help Signavio or the tool provides, as soon as you start to work in it, it is pretty straightforward. If you're a motivated user it might take one to two weeks and then you are fully functional in Signavio.

We just finished a proof of concept with an automotive supplier in Germany where we completed a very rough analysis of about two weeks. We tried, based on the process intelligence approach, to improve the procure to pay process. For example, in this process we identified a quarterly potentially for savings of about €70,000 ($77,000 USD). That's definitely a saving.

We also have a customer that started from a blank sheet of paper and now they have an entirely functioning process landscape. This is intangible and not really a money-wise benefit, but they gained a thousand people in the process landscape during half a year. That's amazing.

To get a more objective view, we did a study last year. This was an internal study where we compared seventy BPMN tools and in the end, there were four or five tools, depending on the use case, that we put on our internal chart list.

Signavio was one of them. Depending on the use case, there might be one or two tools that we also would recommend to a customer. From an overall point of view, Signavio just had the best evaluation based on our survey. When it comes to high-end tool functionalities, they are very close to each other. However, with Signavio, it was also the support, the service, and the prospective. They are really trying to build some good features into the tool over the next one or two years. I'm very sure that they will outperform even the other vendors on our shortlist.

Our clients are not currently using the process intelligence functionality because of a lack of quality data. However, some are starting to implement SAP this year and based on this implementation and the gathered data, there will be definitely a process intelligence or process mining approach. This will happen in the next two to three years.

From our internal BPMN survey of over seventy tools, I feel that Signavio is still a very good choice. That said, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use Signavio as a documentation tool so that everybody gets an overview of all our processes: this is the input to the process, this is the output, and these are the people who are involved in this process.

We want to use Signavio more and more as a process tool to document how long a process runs, and maybe to see how the KPIs are running.

Before we had Signavio, we didn't have a single source of truth. Nobody in our organization wanted to use the old tool anymore because it was not user-friendly. With Signavio, we have a tool that the employees like because it's easy to work with. For example, in the Process Manager, everything is drag-and-drop, making it really easy to model processes. It's also easy to approve processes from the process owner. These functions are much easier than in our old tool.

Signavio Process Manager also helps bridge the gap between operational excellence and customer experience. When you have all your processes documented in the tool, if there are any operational problems, it's easier to fix them. Everything is defined—every role and every responsibility—making it easier to find and solve a problem.

I really like the Collaboration Hub because it's so easy to communicate. And what is really important is that you can use it asynchronously. It doesn't matter if you're working in Italy or in America. You are using the same process and you can speak about the same process. 

I also really like the fact that even if you are just in a draft version, you can share your process with others, so that they can comment on the process, and then you can continue working on it and incorporate the suggestions of others in your process.

There is room for improvement in the reporting function. At the moment, for example, while it is possible to report on how many users you had in the last month, you can't use it to tell you how many users you had from the first week to the second week. This is really a drawback because when you have an activity to promote Signavio or BPI, it would be good to be able to measure how many people you had in the system.

Another issue is that you have revisions, and every time you save the process, it is a new revision. It would be better if we had full versions, so that when we approve a process it would be, for example, the 2.0 version. And when we work on it, it would be 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, et cetera. Once it's approved again, it would be 3.0. That way, you could see at a glance how many times a process was approved.

We bought SAP Signavio Process Manager in September 2019.

In its day-to-day operation, the solution is really easy and helpful to use. But in the last few months, we have had a lot of performance issues. Sometimes Signavio has not been available for many hours. That happened three or four times within six weeks and this had led to acceptance problems.

We currently have about 1,000 processes in Signavio. The tool makes it easy to get an overview of the processes and it makes it easy to handle such complexity. If you only have 30 processes, it might not be necessary to have a real process management tool, but the more processes you have, the better it is to have such a tool.

We have 50 people working in Signavio and we want to increase the intensity of its use but without increasing the number of people who are modeling. The more people we have, the more complex things become. It is not easy to have all the people in meetings to keep them updated.

Signavio's technical support is good. We have used it often and most of our issues were solved. Sometimes there have been things that can't be solved and they have been added as a feature request. But overall, the support is good because every time you send them an issue, you get feedback about it.

Positive

We used BHC Vision. One of the reasons we switched was the fact that, with Signavio, everybody sees the processes well, in terms of modeling. Before, we only had a sequence flow from top to bottom, but now we have processes within lines and you can see, at the first glance, who is responsible for a given step.

I was not involved in the decision to buy Signavio because I was not in the organization at that time. However, I was the project manager for the implementation. I joined the company two months after the decision to go with Signavio, and I set it up.

The setup process was complex because there are so many things you have to keep in mind. There is the configuration of the system, and not only making the tool available, but the roll-out of the processes, the training, and learning all the interfaces.

In addition to me working on the setup full-time, we had an additional person who worked on it half-time. We set up the system and configured it according to the requirements of our organization. Of course, for the BPI content and the processes, there were more people involved.

We had an old tool where we had all our processes and then we had to transfer all the processes from it to Signavio. In the beginning, we thought we would do it in less than a year, but that was not manageable. It took us more than one and a half years to go live.

Due to the fact that Signavio is now part of SAP, the prices have been raised. I don't like that, of course, because we're a customer. 

And what I really don't like is that when they introduced their customer Journey Modeler, we signed up for a beta version and they said to us that we could use this version for the next year without having to pay anything for it. Three months later they said, "Okay, so now the beta version is finished and you have to buy the licenses." And those licenses are really expensive. In comparison to Process Manager, it's not reasonable. The customer Journey Modeler is more than twice the price of Process Manager, which is a lot.

Don't do everything on your own. Ask for help at an early stage. If we had involved Signavio's consultants at an earlier stage, we would have benefited from their best practices that they have learned from working with other customers. We should have trusted their evaluation because Signavio said, at the beginning, with our scenario, that we wouldn't go live in less than a year, and after a year we agreed with them that we wouldn't manage to do so. But it does take time and effort to run such a project.

We don't use the solution to identify and quantify issues during the customer journey. At the moment, for us, it's really only a documentation tool. But of course, in the future, when our organization is more customer-centric, we'll definitely use this.

We use this solution primarily for our single-source business process. 

At this point in time, we've onboarded about 400 people who are actively capturing processes and adding critical attributes. We have a lot of additional people (very hard to put an exact number on that) who have viewed the models.

In terms of deployment and maintenance, there is a team of five people plus a specialist testing these sources. At the moment we are using it across some of our value chains and we will eventually cover the entire organization. I expect that to happen in the next 18 to 24 months.

The Australian banking landscape has just been through a revision (royal commission). It's a government led commission looking into banking practices and there were quite a few findings that came out of that. We are using the process repository to lock down and address process weaknesses. We've actually launched a multi-million dollar transformation program to control our environment. Signavio helps to accomplish this which is imperative to government compliance for us.

What I find most valuable for us is the governance of a workflow by embedding process accountability. It has always been a challenge to define who owns what and under what circumstances you can change processes. 

As we have only used the product for six months, it's too soon to tell what we'd like to see added in the future besides getting the solution fully deployed. At this point, we haven't fully explored the full functionality but it's got things like process manning capability and intelligence capability which we haven't even tapped into yet.

We've had no issues in terms of down times or anything since implementation. I suppose the lack of downtime depends on our AWS server. That's all based in Australia.

As far as scalability, I think it's a bit early for me to tell because we've just started using it. We've had no issues to date but I think as we get more involved with implementing our models, it may become a bit more of an issue. But I really don't know. 

Technical support has been pretty good. The primary support is based in Germany, but they are developing the local capability pretty quickly. A lot of support is currently local. Anything that required assistance from the German office hasn't really made much difference in service time.

We're still in hyper-care mode so support is constantly available. There have been no real issues. Migrating some models from the legacy system — that was seven years out of date —wasn't as simple as I thought it would be. It required a bit of scripting. However, that's a one-time exercise.

After we actually completed the configuration, we never had to go back to the vendor for anything. From the support perspective, everything was done. When we did have to communicate with them, it was related specifically to the old legacy system. The rest of it is pretty straight forward.

We had the ARIS solution before Signavio. The primary difference between the two is that ARIS provided an architectural academic view where Signavio is very user-friendly. Signavio got more people in the business excited about using the tool rather than just focusing on the project and involving the process professionals. We consciously targeted a user group that was organization-wide and we based our decision of tool selection on that.

The initial setup was very simple. It took us less than three weeks from signing the contract to having the first users online. We put people through training and we are onboarding users and our core value change progressively. We're only just getting to the actual the rollout at six months after completing testing.

We are working fairly closely with the vendor for integration. Right now we are only beginning to explore the capabilities for enhancing customer experience, mapping customer journey, and the mapping functionality.

In terms of just implementing it, it's very simple. My team has scaled up very quickly. We are to the point of being able to develop internal user training that I think is quite effective.

We used a vendor for the implementation. They were good and we are more than happy. The vendor spent a few weeks with us training my admin team. It hasn't been complicated at all.

As far as return on investment we've saved cost simply on the licensing. The ability to implement our future plans, which may have been hindered with other solutions, gives us a competitive advantage. In actual dollar amounts, that is impossible to value and much of the realization of the return will come in the future.

Signavio actually worked out a fair bit less expensive for us than some of the competitors. We negotiated an enterprise license for up to 30,000 users for certain components and a per-user license for other components based on our need for those. The company was very flexible in price negotiations in terms of the overall solution. We are paying in the region about eight hundred thousand dollars a year for an enterprise license.

There's nothing in addition to that unless we want additional capacity or features. 

We brought in an analyst to select tools for us to have a look at. We looked at ARIS, IBM Blueworks, and Signavio. We decided to experiment with Signavio and ARIS. Then we got business leaders to come in, have a look at the two and come up with recommendations. By those recommendations, we settled on Signavio. 

I'd give Signavio a nine out of ten at this point. I'm very happy in terms of it performing as we designed. If there are any issues, it's because we don't fully understand the functionality and the capability yet. I think the only reason I'm not giving it a 10 is that I've not had a chance to explore capability and functionality fully.