What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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 is most valuable?
Agility is most valuable because we can develop so much faster than other tools. We can make requirements, develop, and go out to production much faster. So, agility in the software cycle is most valuable.
Its integrations are good. In most cases, Bizagi is not the core of the company, and it has to integrate with other systems, which is easy. It has a lot of tools for integration. It has its own web services such as SOAP. Bizagi is so much easier to integrate because it exposes its own services, and it can consume web services from another system.
What needs improvement?
We have migrated to the cloud, but there are a lot of issues while integrating with the cloud. There are a lot of things to improve with the cloud and reporting. We were previously working with on-premise solutions, and we had access to a lot of things, but with the cloud, they changed a lot of functionalities. Some of the things we know, but with some of the things, we are having difficulties.
They have been working with apps. They have been launching new apps and widgets, but there are a lot of bugs in new functionalities, new widgets, and even new versions. That's an area where they need to improve.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Bizagi for nine years in different roles. In a company where I was working, they bought Bizagi, and I started as a user. After that, I became a developer, and now, I'm a functional and technical consultant.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The functionality we are using is somewhat stable, but when they have new functionalities, new widgets, or even a new version, they have a lot of bugs and it seems that the users are their QA team. We have to report a lot of things, but that's mostly in new versions. When we have a stable version, we don't have a lot of bugs, but when we want to try new things, there are a lot of bugs.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is a big advantage of Bizagi. It can be scaled. With the cloud version, they have to provide the infrastructure to scale our processes. When it was on-premises, the company had the responsibility to expand the infrastructure. In some cases, they didn't have the money, and it became difficult to operate.
Currently, we have three developers and two users to check that everything is okay with the process deployments. In total, we have five people.
How are customer service and support?
It depends on the subscription. They have different levels of technical support. Sometimes, we create a ticket, and they take a week or a few days to respond. With the Gold subscription, they have an NSS, and they need to provide a solution quickly. Generally, their support is good. I would rate them an eight out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We moved to Bizagi because the last solution was obsolete. We didn't have any support. So, we had to migrate a lot of processes to Bizagi. In another project, we were using Enterprise Risk Assessor (ERA), and we changed the process to Bizagi. We have a lot of processes in different solutions. We can migrate a few of them to Bizagi, but not all of them.
In my current organization, we also have a BPM tool from IBM.
How was the initial setup?
It is a cloud solution. It is easy because we don't manage the infrastructure. We just have to configure the environment. It was easy even in the on-premise version.
I handle the test deployments, but production is a different area. A user in the company does the deployment.
What was our ROI?
In the case of most processes that we automate or migrate to Bizagi, the return on investment has to be analyzed first. Before we automate a process, we have to specify that the return on investment is huge and that we can do it. With one of the processes, we saved a lot of paper. In one month, we could pay for the automation.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
In the company where I am working currently, we use the free and the paid version. Bizagi Studio is free, and for production, there is a paid version.
When we were working with the on-premises solution, the licenses were a little bit expensive because we had to buy one by one a package of a hundred licenses, whereas now, we are working with the cloud solution, and it has a different cost. It's a different business model because we pay the license for the developers, but the cost is by the environment, and we have unlimited licenses. The business model is different now, but the benefit ratio is good.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
In another company where I worked, they evaluated Bonitasoft and a few others.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend Bizagi because it's an excellent tool, but I would advise optimizing your processes before automating them. In my experience, a lot of companies automate the processes but don't optimize them before automating them. The advice is to follow the life cycle and optimize before automating because making changes after the automation would require a lot of work.
The initial deployment of processes was complex because we had a lot of integrations and huge processes. With most processes, the first deployment is complex. There are unexpected incidents. Sometimes, the data is not the same as the environment. We have to do a lot of settings with the integration certificates, and it takes a lot of time to make the environment work, but after that, the deployments are short and take about 30 minutes, but the first one is about five or six hours. We also have to test that the deployment is successful. The maintenance of processes/tools is an ongoing job. We are making a lot of improvements continually. We are maintaining the tools and updating them as per the necessity of the users.
I would rate it a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
*Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner