SAP Signavio Process Manager Reviews

The main use case is really to make the process visible for the organization to help them understand it. We also use it to create a clear definition, not only of process steps, but also the roles behind the process. If you think about our organization, that is something that we really need to explain to people that are new.

In terms of transforming our business, Signavio provides an easy way to make new processes visible and understandable to the organization. It depends on the level of detail you create and how big the process is, but that is the main thing.

I'm not a heavy user but I really like the concept of the Collaboration Hub, where people can work together on the processes. I would say in general, what I like most is that it is an easy to use tool. I have also worked with ARIS, and this is much easier.

I would say the collaboration features are very useful to us, because we are a European organization, so we are not in one location. This is an easy way to share with other people and ask them for feedback. That is the use case for us.

We have been using Signavio for around two years.

For me, I would give everybody in our organization the possibility to look at their processes. That is our goal. That is also one reason why our process design is on an activity level and not more because everybody should understand it. From a designer perspective, I think we have around 100 designer licenses. We would like to have a difference between a designer from the business and somebody from my team because they now have access to everything with the designer license, and that does not work if you are in a large organization.

You cannot ask a business or a person to use ARIS. It's not possible. Sometimes, if you navigate through the process flow in ARIS, you do not remember at a certain point where you started. It is not easy to come back to that point. I sometimes say that the process models in ARIS are three dimensional. That is too much for our normal thinking process, so you get lost.

It did not take long to get this product up and running. I would say we did two or three really intense workshops with one of the Signavio guys going through the configuration and general settings. Then we went through it as a team and decided on this. It was really quick. It took us more to determine what the content would be and how we wanted to start. We created a process house. That was more an issue of how to start from a content perspective.

We also discussed how we can explain the use case for Signavio but it's really just that the people use it. We actually have around 5,000 process models in the tool and we only started with the real usage of the tool at the beginning of the year. They really use it in their projects to maintain the processes. It is the best indicator that there is a good investment if you have a lot of users, especially if they also create data in the tool.

I would rate Signavio an eight out of ten. It's very user-orientated, which is why I gave it a high rating, even if it is not perfect in every corner. If you create your product with happy users, then you have done a lot of things right.

Our use case is to get a better understanding of our process. We want to get right to the core of it. We went through a multi-year automation journey and we found that most people really didn't know their processes well enough. Signavio is helping us to go back to basics a bit and document our processes in a standard way in a central repository. It also gives us a better understanding of the process so that we can be more targeted, accurate, and effective in the way we do our transformation.

It is still early days, but we have big plans. We want to embed the use and maintenance of the process data into everything that we do. We have various roles and operations from line management and business management to risks, supervisors, and change people. We need to embed the consistent use of a single store, a golden source of data for everything that we do. Our plan is to get the process documented, but then make sure that people use that, so it's not something that sits on a shelf somewhere and people only look at it when there's a problem or issue.

In terms of a business transformation, we've had a couple of successes and good examples, but we're going slowly, so it's going to take us some time to get there. We're setting the foundation for it, hopefully.

Signavio's phone apps help improve employee's workday functions, certainly on the chain side. People that typically pick up a process map for everything that they do are getting a lot of use out of it. The feedback so far is this is great. This is something that we needed. We've gone through a lot of transformation over the last ten years, but this is setting the stage for the future.

The reason we chose Signavio is it's a very robust industrial-grade business process modeling data tool, with data capture behind it, as well as a collaborative nature. A lot of it comes out of the box and requires less technology involvement. It can be run well by business users. That's what we really like about it.

It is also easy to use. We were using Visio, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and Paint until very recently to document our processes. Through this automation program I was leading, we were using another product, which has the word blue in it, which was a leg up from Visio, but still not quite what we were expecting. For us, it's really about the data-driven aspect so we are able to access the data and stitch different things together, especially when you're looking at things in hindsight.

There are a couple of things that could be improved. First, I think the interface itself can improve a bit. I think the interface is still stuck about a decade in the past, if I may be so brutal about it. Some of the buttons are really small, so you can't even see them. I think it needs upgrading to the 21st century with apps and the way we use mobile phones. 

Secondly, although the navigation is fine and the customization is absolutely phenomenal, it is difficult to create different perspectives and views without having to take the data out of the system and use a BI tool. Those would be sort of the two main things from my perspective.

We've been using this product for less than six months.

There have been no major issues, as we are on-premises. We're not on a cloud origin, although we'd like to move to that at some point.

We're actually working on extending our licenses. We want to almost double the number of licenses we have. That's because the amount of engagement we've had has been really good.

Their support is okay. Sometimes, we find that the turnaround time isn't as great and it can sometimes takes a few chasers to get a response, but for the most part it's okay.

This is the kind of question my boss would ask me. He said, "What's the ROI?" I would tell him that the ROI will be in the future. We've had a couple of examples where people have told us that this is what they needed. It gives them the visibility that they didn't have. It is still in the early days, though.

We started this journey with Signavio two years ago. It was actually one of my colleagues that met them at an OpEx conference in the U.S. That's sort of been our top of the list choice since then. We knew we needed to prove to ourselves and the organization that we needed a tool. That's why we used that other blue tool for a year and a half to inform our requirements and get better at it. Then we made a case for it. I think the on-premises version was always important to us. We weren't ready to put all of our stuff in the cloud yet, but I thought we were getting better at it. The collaborative nature of it and being able to customize a lot of things that we wanted without having to rely on technology support is really good. Some of the features like the API for putting data in and out provide a lot of functionality. We did a pretty extensive assessment of other solutions, but we decided that this technology was the best of all.

I would rate this solution somewhere between a seven and eight out of ten, because of a couple of things that we would want out of the box. The whole goal for us is not to be relying on technology to support us, but I can't customize a view or use customer attributes that I created. In some cases, I can use them, but it is very limited. Basically that and the interface are the only issues I have.

We use this solution for our projects. We describe the project requirements and build the process landscape.

Signavio Process Manager is very easy to use, and its ease is one of the reasons that people are adopting it. Next week, I will be teaching some of my new colleagues how to write models using the process manager. Using this solution makes it very easy for new people to start writing their own models, and we already have lots of people using it internally.

At this time, we do not have a process model lifecycle. This is something that we may do in the future, but not now.

While I cannot yet say that this solution has helped to improve employees’ workdays, I am hoping to see this by next year.

Using Signavio has changed the way people in our organization think about processes. To start thinking in processes is very important when it comes to describing them in the modeler and for discussing models. The software helps with this.

The collaborative features have definitely helped to create a process-centric mindset. After modeling in the workshop, I can invite people to read and write comments about the objects in the model. This allows the model to change and developer before the next workshop starts.

The most valuable features are syntax evaluation, the editor, and version management.

The editor is very easy to operate and I like it for writing models.

Version management is helpful because I like to try different versions and then decide which of them should be the main model.

I would like to be able to link a single word within a textual description directly to the glossary. For example, I would like to be able to link the names of the objects in every subject to the corresponding entry in the glossary.

This solution is very stable. I cannot remember a situation where it has broken down.

We have not yet reached a limit for what we are using, so we haven't really tested scalability.

The technical support from Signavio is excellent.

We had a problem with the database migration that was caused by a bad file in our database. The export and import would break down every time, so we had to find the problem step by step. We collaborated with technical support and they helped us to solve the problem. It was very good.

The initial setup is very easy. You have to configure the software, the rules, and the rights for the objects. All of this is easy to do. 

We don't measure ROI so I cannot say.

We did not discuss other options before choosing Signavio.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this type of solution is to first think about the needs of your business. Begin with the processes in the organization, and then start to do the modeling using either Signavio or something else. It is most important to understand the business and its needs.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using Signavio mainly in the context of tax compliance management systems. We are supporting clients by documenting their processes, risks, and controls within Signavio. We also use Signavio to import processes into a workflow management tool.

Signavio is only a part of what we are doing, maybe 10% of a project. What's important for our clients, however, is to get that transparency about the processing. This is really the success we can show by using BPMN modeling.

This product helps change the way we approach business transformation. I don't know if it's really the Signavio tool itself. It's the BPMN modeling. This helps with convincing people and supporting them throughout their transformation.

Signavio's way of handling is really an advantage. It's quite easy to use, without too much training. That's the main point for me.

It's quite difficult for clients to change from describing their process in variety to a process modeling tool. This tool helps convince them in the projects, by using BPMN modeling, which is a close step of automation. There's a code that can be machine-read and so used for further automation.

My team does not use the process intelligence function but other colleagues of ours do use it. It's helpful, but there is still a long way to go for Signavio to be a leader in this area. There are other tools.

I think the intuitive handling is an issue which they should be more focused on, especially as we have issues with the glossary. If you want to implement Signavio within procedures in contact with other software, it's quite difficult to integrate and you will have several points where you have to double and triple the work because you cannot maintain the data centrally. With other solutions, we can integrate it and have only one data transfer, to import and export with other solutions. A glossary is still limiting us.

From time to time we have performance issues with Signavio, but in general it's stable.

Their technical support team is quite responsive but we are so deep in the details that we are really challenging them. I think my team in some cases knows much more than their technical support.

With regard to BPMN modeling, I would rate it a seven to eight out of ten. With regard to other functions, I would say four to five.

We've had a restructuring in our company last year, so a lot of functions that have come are quite new and a lot of new staff are being hired as well. It's particularly useful to have this repository of processes so that new staff can get on board easily and use the knowledge that's available to start working immediately.

There was a lack of clarity at our company, in terms of how certain transactions were supposed to be done. I think with this step-by-step approach in terms of process definition, as well as the ability for people to access the repository easily, we can remove any doubts of how they should be doing their work.

The solution will enable us to carry out the entire process environment life cycle in a unified manner, although we have not gone to that full cycle yet. We are just able to document our new processes as per the new business model that we have. We hope to complete the circle to go into improvement analysis next year, followed by a new version of their processes.

The solution functionality gives everyone in our organization what they need. One way or another, people are sort of developing their business processes on their own, but it differs from department to department. Now, we have a consistent way to model the processes and communicate them. It is now in one unified language.

We have not needed to make changes to our processes yet, but I think as people model their processes, they already see at the outset that there are possible improvements that can be made.

Employees are more productive because they can do a transaction without any ambiguity or issues down the line.

Signavio is approaching the point where its collaborative features will help to create a process-centric mindset. The good thing is the fact that you can raise comments on processors, which gives a lot of power to the end-users. They can say which areas need to be improved or get back at the process modelers to improve their processes in the future.

The fact that the repository is available on the web is the most valuable feature. It's a very simple tool. If you can use something simple and visual, you should be able to use the model as well in Signavio. It has the ability, for example, to track versioning control, so if you make updates to the processes, you have the ability to track the versions as well.

We had a solution before that was not as easy to use. A recent internal survey showed that people have found that Signavio is much more user-friendly. One of our goals was to make sure that our own staff is able to learn a model as opposed to relying on external resources. Our staff was able to be trained on how to use this tool and the model they own for themselves. In terms of ease use, it's very good.

I think the biggest selling point that Signavio talks about is its collaborative aspect. However, there's still a lot more improvement in terms of what they can do, how they receive comments, address comments, whether they actually provide feedback, etc. There is still a little bit more improvement to be made on those areas.

I think it's been very stable so far. There have been no crashes or other issues. We're happy with their regular updates.

Currently, we don't have that many users, so we can't yet test it in terms of scaling up. So far we have gone from ten users initially up to 50 modelers. We are also increasing the number of people accessing the collaboration hub. So far, so good.

Their technical support is very good. They have a very good way of accessing the users and are able to easily put our tickets forward to resolve them. On top of that, I feel that we still have customer success managers as well who check in periodically to see whether we are happy with the solution overall and see how they can help out with that.

We had an older solution that was not as easy to use and our staff was not able to learn how to use the previous tool. With Signavio, one of the selling points is that everybody comes out of a one to two-day training able to model their processes. You get that ability to do it yourself and start modeling very fast.

Our experience was that we used Signavio's own consulting team to do something called a rapid deployment. This was a quick and easy way to introduce Signavio into the organization. In just a few days, they came on site and talked to us to understand our context and situation. Then they could configure the entire solution. It's a very easily convertible solution anyway. Nonetheless, they walked us through it and it gave us the confidence to use the solution.

I think we're spending about $150,000 a year on licensing costs.

I think we were looking at a few state-of-the-art vendors that are out there. They were famous ones like Bizagi, KiSSFLOW, etc. Signavio ticked all of our boxes because you have the ability to model in open formats, such as BPMN, they have a web-based portal, and it was simpler. The other solutions can get a little bit more complicated. This one was a simple, easy to use software that was good for us.

If you are thinking of a solution where you don't have to be dependent on external resources through the modeling part and you want to be more self-sufficient, Signavio is the way to go. It enables you to get your own staff to do the process documentation easily. The most important thing is that we're able to update the processes periodically, which is what we wanted. We didn't want an obsolete processing repository after a few years. We want to give the incentive to staff to update them. That's one of the major reasons I would say you should adopt it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. It's still a developing product and I have confidence that there is still a lot of room to improve. Of course, I'm not using the Velocity Edition yet, so I do see a lot of things that are improving in terms of integration aspects. They look and feel the same. They've integrated all the different modules. I hope that I would be able to give the Velocity Edition a nine out of ten. I think one of the issues was the fact that the solutions looked different because they brought different modules. Now, however, the new one addresses them in a more integrated fashion. The user interface is a bit lacking, which is why I only gave it a score of eight of ten.

We are a transmission system operator that handles the high voltage electricity network in all of Switzerland. There are a lot of core processes and managing support processes, and they need to be very accurate because what we're doing is quite critical.

It's critical infrastructure, so doing things wrong at the core can cause a lot of damage and cost a lot of money, but it can also cause injury or death. It is dangerous, therefore our processes need to be very well understood and need to be run very strictly.

Our employees rely on the Collaboration Hub to understand the processes. They know exactly what to do and how to do it, what the procedure is, and if necessary, what forms to use. We have a few modelers around the company who are based in the business units. They keep up with what the processes are, keep them alive, and keep them updated.

One of the things that are quite easy to achieve with a tool like this is that you start getting together and talking about what you're doing. Being able to show that, graphically, raises the understanding of what all of the team members think we are doing. It is a good way to discuss our understanding, which could be different than it was in the beginning. Just condensing and focusing on this graphical representation unifies our views, which I think is already a big, big step in improving what we're doing.

I think that this solution would help us to carry out the entire process improvement lifecycle. However, I fear that our maturity of processes is not too high. I'm glad that most of the critical processes are there, documented, can be read, and are kept alive. We're not really doing an improvement lifecycle, not really doing metrics measuring, doing improvement, or things like that. We're still one or more stages away from that.

For the time being, I think that everyone in our organization has the functionality that they need.

In terms of improved employees’ workdays, I have seen stability brought to them. I noticed it first about three years ago. This solution has also improved from the modeling side over that time, whereas it has always been easy for the end-user.

I have done a lot of modeling over quite a number of years, and I think that the modeling capabilities in Signavio are state of the art.

The most valuable thing for me is the collaboration hub that can be used by everybody. They can really get their information quickly. It shows them the logic workflows, and also allows them to get the needed documentation, forms, templates, and whatever they need. It's easy to use, you know where you go to get your information, and it's very valuable for everybody.

For us, it would help a lot if this solution had floating licenses. I would consider this to be my number one improvement because we try to involve as many people as possible in modeling, rather than having them just consume work that other people have done. We feel that it is important for people to identify with the processes, and with what we model, so it requires that we have a lot of licenses. If we had a floating license or a concurrent license, then it would help a lot.

Stability has been fine for quite some time, although I had some trouble with the introduction of a new release a few weeks ago. This shook the stability slightly, and unfortunately, it was exactly at the time I was giving a course on using Signavio.

It took perhaps one or two days where it was very slow, and sometimes not responding at all, but it is now back to normal and working well.

We have four hundred and fifty to five hundred people in our company who have access to our processes through the Collaboration Hub. 

We started with perhaps three hundred users in the beginning, which is not a big difference from where we are now, but scaling it was fine. 

In most of the cases, technical support has been quite quick. Not always, but what I liked is that when I had a problem and there was an answer, I used the tracking tool and it was easy to get back to the same person.

This is important to me because I've had experience in other areas where if you need to have three contacts for one topic, you always start at point zero with a new person. This is very boring and I didn't see that. In this way, I think that technical support is good and organized.

Before I joined the company, they were using ARIS BPM. It was perceived as being complex and not easy to use.

The setup seemed straightforward. When I saw it, the solution was up and running.

We used a company called EnerBit in Switzerland. They are a partner of Signavio and they performed the setup for us.

Measuring ROI is quite a complex thing, which is probably the main reason why we don't currently do it. My gut feeling is that we have realized ROI because the license is not too expensive.

I think that the price of the licenses is between $2,000 USD and $3,000 USD per license per year, plus the hub usage. I cannot remember the exact cost, but it is affordable.

The biggest investment is in training the people, and building up the processes and discussing how it should be. That's where a lot of time goes. That's where the money goes. For me, this equilibrium is very good. The money should not go into licenses, but rather the big value is in the content in the end.

We did a GATT / WTO and there were a lot of companies applying. One of our central points was ease of use, especially for the end-users, but secondly for the modelers. I think that Signavio was selected because of this. It was very easy to use.

I was in the software business for a long time, developing SaaS solutions, so I am quite critical when it comes to rating products. I think Signavio BPM does its job, it is easy to use, but it runs a little slow sometimes and it could be faster.

I would rate this solution a seven 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 are building models using the Signavio Process Manager, and we are using the Workflow Accelerator to optimize our workflows.

This solution has helped to improve the organization because it makes processes more transparent and workflows better. It is not so manual any more. Because we use the Workflow Accelerator, it is more structured.

Signavio's ease of use depends on whether you have experience with designing processes. You can define the attributes and what a person can do, which is easy. However, if you are fairly new and nothing has been defined then it may be a bit complicated because you can be overwhelmed by so many symbols and so many things that you can do.

Using this solution has helped make the business transformation easier. You can take an existing process an improve on it because everybody collaborates on it. 

The feature that I like the most is the Collaboration Hub, where every user or every employee can see the process in the overview. This helps because it adds transparency such that everybody can see and discuss the same process. You can change it and it stays current for everybody. Also, you don't have to send an email or use a shared folder or anything like that. You can just work on it using the interactive Process Manager.

If you have a lot of tasks in the workflow engine then it gets a bit slow.

Being able to integrate the Workflow Accelerator with more products would be good.

I used Signavio as a student, and have now been using it for two and a half or three years professionally. I helped bring this solution to my current company after using it at the university.

Last year, we had a blackout for one day or something like that, but since then it has been very stable.

This solution is very scalable because we are using Software as a Service.

We started with two Process Managers, now we have three or four. Also, with Workflow Accelerator, we started I think with twenty users and now we are around seventy.

We only have email support and I would say that it is good.

Because we are using Software as a Service, there are no issues with installation, setup, or upgrades. Just open Internet Explorer, Chrome, or another browser and use it.

There is a saving in time by using the Workflow Accelerator because we have made the process leaner. 

With respect to choosing a solution for our requirements, it was the subject of a discussion that we had at the company. In the discussion, there was both the process team and the team that decided which product to purchase. I chipped in and said I had already used it in university, and said that it was good.

Now that we have it, everybody seems to like it.

We are not using automation and process mining at this time. We are just using the Workflow Accelerator and the Process Manager.

I am happy with this solution but there is still room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.