ARIS BPA Reviews

Primary use case of the solution is for implementing the digital management system of a company, documenting processes, documents, IT system, roles, and organization, and, of course, their interconnections.

ARIS is really flexible in terms of what you can do to customize your methodology, so it supports various flavors of management system implementations. For example, some companies have a greater focus on Risk and Compliance management, SAP implementations and roll-outs, process improvement and reorganization, etc.

I can give a good example from one of my last projects, where I worked as an external consultant. At an oil and gas company, ARIS really made a big impact in offering an integrated solution where all of the employees could easily access the relevant information on critical safety processes, thus lowering the risk of accidents and potentially harmful events.

In other projects I’ve worked on, I’ve seen that it really helps people working on SAP template rollout projects, as all project members have more or less common information about which company-wide processes are part of the rollout, and what are the specifics in the local process variants.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility of the solution to fully customize the methodology according to the company's needs, and to enforce that methodology with features like filters, semantic checks, and reports.

Also, there is a really powerful reporting API that allows you to create almost any kind of report you want out of your process and document repository.

The functionalities for search, query, and social collaboration are getting better with every new release of the tool.

The whole redesign of the content publishing platform, and move from Business Publisher to ARIS Connect portal was a great move.

There are some things in the collaboration module that could be improved a little, such as the functionality which dynamically pushes notifications to interested people when a process changes during the Release Cycle Management workflow.

Also, while the dashboarding solution for integrating all kinds of process-related information from company sources other than ARIS is getting ever better, my personal wish would be to have a module that is more targeted to an Agile implementation of some modeled processes (model–to-execute).

ARIS has an internal fully customizable workflow system called APG, which is very good, but it’s targeted mostly at creating workflows related to ARIS content, and not general workflows to support other processes inside a company.

I give it an eight out of 10, but I’m really happy with the product in regards to the primary use case.

Process Modeling or Process Mapping/Documentation. This is the most comprehensive tool for capturing the process details. Any organization who wants to embark on a BPM journey, process mapping/documentation, lays the foundation for the BPM led implementation.

Since ARIS provides such a rich modeling environment, it can be leveraged not just for automation of the processes, but more importantly for maintaining the blue prints of the processes for any organization be it business, internal or support processes.

This, then, provides a real picture of the status quo of any organization at any given time.

Using ARIS, an organization can document their business processes.

Also, the tool provides the facility to capture process details not just at one level but at multiple levels, depending on the audience who would consume it.

It helps not only to capture the process steps but with different aspects of the processes like org, KPI, systems, roles, infrastructure, documents, etc.

Once captured, the tool helps to analyze the processes and impact of changes in the organization from the system, process, KPI, perspective.

Since this is a design tool, seamless interface to make the process flows executable.

Between 9-10 years .

None.

None, since the launch of ARIS 9.x, the product architecture has changed and this has made it bit more complex from Administration perspective.

Three out of five.

None.

Medium complexity.

Pricing is a bit on the higher side.

Not really.

Best tool for documentation of business processes.

The reporting by ARIS is clearly helps us see which resources are doing enough.

The most valuable feature is that you can relate different aspects of an organization to each other, and you can clearly define the rates seen in the application. And, with all of the reporting you can clearly see which resource is doing the most and which resource is not doing enough. So, there is an over or under capacity visualization.

One of the biggest challenges is to realistically enable the defined structures of the processes that you have in ARIS documented, and then actually implement them in the business. If you could see the way those structures and processes are not used then you could identify the bottlenecks that are the real issues and make the necessary changes. But, instead, there is a discrepancy between all of these group processes and all of the documentation that has been in ARIS. When you are going through the business, it's like "Oh, we did like this...How can  you ensure that those processes are actually really followed within your business?" How that is possible, I do not know. From our automation perspective, I think it will be easier because then you can link your EPS or whatever you want or two levels down to your actual application. This application is automated and then you can know "Oh, this piece of code is doing that task always like that." And, that would be great to be able to manage real process and code, as well as everything from ARIS. All of that information is difficult to implement and enforce.

In terms of room for improvement, it may be nice to give access to whatever information in ARIS for a non-process kind of person. And, if you do not understand the basic labels, then there should be training for those people. Perhaps provide simple graphics to help those training sessions.

From an operational perspective, it is quite stable. 

If you do it right, a good scalable product is what you come up with.

We had an ARIS technical person that would consult with headquarters when we needed help. She found it quite frustrating. They did not always understand what we were telling them and they always gave some answer that did not always provide the necessary resolution. So, that has been a bit frustrating for us. Eventually, the issues were resolved. 

Setup was straightforward. 

Obviously to bring knowledge and know-how that you don't have in house.  Also somebody that is unique. And,from a vendor selection perspective, if one could know up front "Okay I know you know you've done a million of these things and you support like a lot of people and you've seen it all, but don't lose that ability to see something for the first time for real and think outside of the box." I think that's key.

We also used Enterprise Architect.

Visualizes processes which helps the business see pain points.

Overall BPM modeling functionality is very good. Lots of features to speed modeling for experienced users.

• Price is high.
• Newer versions (9.x) are technically more difficult to maintain.

Yes, there have been stability issues with v9.x.

No issues with scalability.

Poor to acceptable depending on issue, but mostly poor.

Technically easy, but BPM and EA are complex and require considerable pre-planning.

Negotiate. Price is high so make sure you’re getting the best deal.

Consider less expensive options.

One of the main demands that we have at the moment from our customers is not only to map and share their diagrams but also to govern them and automate them. Our major customers come from the banking sector and we also have 2/3 of the telcos and some insurance companies of our country on board. We are a partner with ARIS and I'm the senior manager. 

I really fancy the fact that this solution makes it so easy to have a clear understanding of how the objects you are mapping are used in your database. You can select an object and have a list of all the diagrams that it has been re-used and you can also have it output as an Excel file. There is also the ability to sort via multiple criteria to identify the relationships you need for a specific object and also find correlated models. This is one of the strongest features of the solution. It's better than having to do all the mapping and the analysis using your office tools. It is really powerful, especially if you have a large team that can spend a lot of time working on new solutions and new use cases. Competition has increased in the last few years and there are now clones of ARIS on the market but they don't go as deep as ARIS, so the ARIS product is still far ahead. 

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.

I've been using this solution for 20 years. 

Very reliable 

The initial setup is pretty easy but in most cases of large enterprises adaptation is required based on their LDAP Integration and SSO needs. It's the first step with every customer. Software AG'' s team is always willing to help us out in any situation even in the most demanding cases where functionality customization was requested.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

It serves as internal Knowledge Management System where we keep all business processes and related documents in a single repository.

Object oriented modeling, so we can trace what's going on with the specified object.

It needs external API and the ability to navigate back, similar to "Back" in web browser.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Nine out of 10.

For the standard DBMS, things are quite straightforward. Network security and server security settings can be issued.

If you can afford it, it's the best so far.

I rate it an eight out of 10. It's not a 10 due to the price.

You need a dedicated team to get the benefits. 

1. With a tool like ARIS, it helps to maintain a single source of truth regarding the processes followed within an organization. This creates a more efficient organization with just one single view of the processes across the organization and eliminates any ambiguity. 
2. The analysis and reporting capabilities make ARIS the best tool for process modeling. In addition, the flexibility and versatility of the tool can be gauged by the sheer number of model types it supports which is close to approximately 200.

Any organization big or small should have the capability of capturing the process details of an entire organization using this tool.

Process modeling and process analysis. Due the meta model of the tool, it forces a particular way for the processes to be modeled in the tool, which in turn helps to carry out the analysis and generate reports for business and senior management. This helps the business make an informed decision.

Needs flexibility in automation of the modeling processes and real-time analysis of data, not just a static view.

Since ARIS 9.X was released, the product has not been as robust and responsive as the previous versions.

None.

I would rate it as a seven out of 10. There is not enough documentation provided for the tool's support or administration.

No previous solution was used.

The setup was a bit complex compared to the previous version of the tool.

It is on the higher side.

No.

Excellent product if process modeling/documentation is its primary purpose, not automation of processes.

• Fully-reportable database over Visio
• Heavy dashboarding with ARIS Aware
• Automation capabilities
• Direct SAP connection

Procedurally and architecturally improved analysis across the board.

• Price
• User interface (UI)

We have used this product for six years. ARIS products and releases from 7.2 through ARIS 10. We were even invited by SAG as a partner for version 10's sneak peek.

Rarely.

Best product for full-size enterprises and their efforts.

SAG could improve, but there is a vast network of community users.

Tried many BPA tools, but ARIS seems to be the best fit for the largest efforts we have focused efforts on.

You could walk someone through it, but I would not recommend trying it on their own.

It is well worth the investment in the enterprise.

Visio, Blueworks, Signavio, and ARIS. Absolutely choose ARIS or Signavio.