What needs improvement with ARIS BPA?

Improvement should be made as per customer requirements.

I always miss an execution module that is better than the current one. The current one is called ARIS Process Governance, and it's mostly focused on setting up internal workloads for ARIS and the process content. If you want to do some release cycle management processes, you would use the ARIS Process Governance module to create a workflow that sends tasks and emails to the users of ARIS. ARIS BPA is not really a platform that offers you the opportunity to execute processes that you model. So, the model for execution is something that is missing. Typically, I wouldn't recommend ARIS as a process execution platform. The solution is not built for automating and running workflows.

ARIS BPA's scripting language takes work to understand. Even a JavaScript developer has to learn the language to write the script. This particular area needs to be easier to understand. The user interface could be more intuitive and better designed. There is a lot of unused space in the interface, which could be utilized. Additionally, the color needs to be changed to make it more user-friendly.

They should make improvements as per customer requirements.

Sometimes, ARIS BPA breaks down, and its stability can be improved.

The product is difficult to use for someone without prior knowledge of working with it. It requires a certain level of administration training.

BPA is used to represent reality. We need to find and implement potential improvements from a workshop presentation and then monitor the results. We are not implementing these tools to plan and organize artifacts. This tool covers everything except implementation because that is not the purpose of a BPA tool. However, this tool can interface with implementation tools, and after implementation, you can use APIs and other interfaces to get information back from reality. In terms of improvement, the app could use some small details and functionalities. However, I need more time to sync to get more specific suggestions. We already have interfaces for these four tools, and it is possible to develop interfaces for the other four tools. Inside the product, we can have a developer environment where we can create new scripts using APIs or STPI. This is the environment that we use to help interface the tools. In the past, we had many packages of interfaces. The suppliers of the provider preferred to have these package interfaces. We like to open the code, at least part of the code, with APIs and other things like this so that the consultants can create the interfaces with the specific tools. We use APIs and other search tools for this.

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.

The pricing of the solution can be improved and the initial setup should be made easy.

The solution's processes are huge and it is not easy to get an overview of how things work. It needs to improve the interface. I would like to see the product include a better overview of processes and improve search.

The tool needs to improve its support since they take long to respond.

Although the reporting and the information query features are good, they could do with some improvement. I'd also like to see better control over the library assets. It takes a lot of effort to maintain all the different types of central libraries. I'd like to see a simplification of the automation in the next update, it's currently quite a complex process.

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.

The Risk and Compliance Management tool is rather complex. So, we customized it. Customization was done by SAG and was done fast. The facility for sharing content should be enhanced. For example, it would be nice if you could share content with viewers who do not explicitly have access to the model. As it is now, if you share a process with somebody that does not have access to the model, then the person receives a link that simply tells them they have no access. Particularly, when you're in the process of modeling something and you want to share it because you want to get feedback from your colleagues, I would appreciate being able to share that content. It could be valid for a period, such as 24 hours or one week. This is something that would help.

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.

The standard out-of-the-box solutions for modeling are not so good. You have to do some configuration to make it easier and more user-friendly. There are a lot of options, so that can get confusing, but if you filter some things out, then it's easier to use. After you customize it, the end-user has an easy toolset to work from. Another feature I would like to see is the complete visualization of the connect portal.

I had this decentralization mission where I had some friendly fights with the consultants of Software AG. My opinion was the business department should be able to publish their processes and do all their evaluation stuff in ARCM themselves. It has to be a one stop shop. I want a one stop shop to go from ARIS BPM to ARIS ARCM, because having everything go through that would be an improvement due to the inputs that we made with Software AG. They will make it possible that the trigger sent from BPM to ARCM will start their object generation. Although, they did something in SR 16 for our business needs, and that was great. The process needs to be straight-through. This means, if the process experts say, "Okay, I'm finished. I sent the process to my boss," and the boss says, "Okay, it's great. The documentation is right," and they can give approval. Then, the process experts can click on it, and five minutes later, they will get the risk for the evaluation. After that, the process expert says, "Okay, it has this and those risks. We could lose this amount." So, they send it again for approval back to the boss. The boss reviews whether the risk evaluation is right, then it is approved. Finally, it is finished in one hour (in a best case scenario). The yearly process documentation can then be completed without the action of any central process management board.

I didn't like working with this solution. The design and functions are lacking and they are better in Bizagi. The interface could be improved. The solution is difficult and not very exciting to learn. It was a bit complicated to understand. Aris BPA is very complex and very difficult to start learning and onboarding. When you compare it with Bizagi, Bizagi is better. The interface is nicer, the onboarding process is easier, and they have a manual for you to start with. It is better because I could understand how to start with it.

There is a lot of room for improvement. They need to increase the performance of the system flow. They need to support it more. ARIS Process Governance is still quite basic, and they are using an old BPM and process automation module. They have a problem with the form. It's good but has limitations when integrating with other systems. This means that ARIS Process Governance or process automation is limited to the ARIS framework. Integration with other systems is available with the ARIS API but isn't usable in APG. There isn't a proper workflow, and they need to merge their API module with the APG module. This will increase the capability of the form builder. Customization of ARIS will also be simpler and more user-friendly. They have tried to do that for more than ten years, but I don't know what they are doing now. The installer could be improved to avoid multiple installations. For example, you have to run a script in the database site to complete the installer. So all those should be in one single point for installation. Enter all this data in the installer, and the installer will go and create the system database in the database. The price could also be better.

Its governance tool and integration with ESB and execution engine can be improved. Their partner support can also be improved.

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.

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.

If you look at the administration function, it is rather complex. If you want to create new reports then you have to use JavaScript, or ARIS script as they call it, which is beyond the competencies of most people. I would recommend to Software AG that they move to SaaS as soon as possible. Currently, they have a cloud offering, but they don't really have a SaaS business model in place. They are still thinking in terms of licenses and my recommendation to them would be to stop doing this and move to SaaS ASAP because all of the other competitors are moving in that direction. As a SaaS, they might reconsider the positioning of the ARIS portfolio in the markets and to have, for example, specific pricing or specific environments for mid-size companies, instead of just a single implementation for enterprises.

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.

Most of our customers and myself would expect that the next complementary step for this platform would be to offer easily customizable content governance. Mini workflows provided out of the box should be open to be easily adapted by customers. There could also be improvements to the automation part which some new -with the BPM practice- customers find a bit overwhelming. Other vendors are promoting that they have diagrams automated within the same platform. For this to happen with ARIS there is an extra step required to export these diagrams in the webmethods platform, which can be overwhelming for customers because web methods is a very huge though very powerful automation engine and they hesitate to deal with it. It's clear that there are different skills required for mapping compared to those required for automation. In an ideal world, you'd have a mixed team working in automation projects. It would be nice to offer them just one tool for satisfying these two different audiences.

Integration with third-party tools should be improved (e.g. based on APIs).

With ARIS BPM, the script creation is quite cumbersome. With version ten, the typed ones were quite extensive where we needed our developers to do scripting. If they can improve on that so that we just outline analytics and then produce the required scripts, that would be ideal. I've not fully looked at ARIS BPM because we are only now evaluating the management of business processes. We've been more focused on AP, so we are seeing less to be utilized as for BPM capability. We've been planning that late for our part. There's currently an issue where we don't have people in direct communication, even with the reviewing models, using ARIS BPM. Another issue that they could improve in their functionality is the guidance, i.e. if they look at the processes that you have running or not. They will clear you in the interim going into business system areas, highlighting the information that you need the script to support. ARIS BPM generates functions according to need and creating the script from the start could be improved likw having those functionalities as part of the system.

I would like to see a simpler process for integrating with other tools. When we tried to integrate ARIS with other external tools, it was not easy. I would like to see the reporting aspects improved.