SAP Signavio Process Manager Reviews

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.