What advice do you have for others considering ARIS BPA?

The awareness about business processes typically becomes much higher with the solution. Some organizations use Word documents, Excel, and PowerPoint to sketch up some business processes. This is typically done as a one-off exercise. Later, this gets forgotten, or someone leaves the company. Someone new comes, and then they may use a completely new methodology or way of modeling or working. The positive thing about ARIS BPA is that you can easily set up and configure your methodology once. Then, everyone using it uses the same way of modeling processes, depicting different relationships between objects, models, roles, applications, etc. You can establish a new unified methodology that can be expanded later on as you grow, or you want to model some other artifacts within your enterprise. It does help you establish a common methodology and a common repository to build your business process management and business process analysis suite. Overall, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten.

ARIS BPA's facilitate the visualization of change management during the development phase. We can extract the factory report directly. It is quite encouraging for the users. It has been in the best leadership position in Gartner since 2023. I rate it a nine out of ten.

Overall, I would rate it a nine out of ten.

I would recommend ARIS BPA to other users. Overall, I rate ARIS BPA an eight out of ten.

I rate ARIS BPA an eight out of ten. I advise others to appoint an executive with specific knowledge about the product.

The solution is not easy to use. People at the operational level don't have the abstraction level needed for this proposal. When they get information from business people, they immediately decide on the other model. They come with additional information from other business departments and do the same. To do things properly, you need to think about a proper structure based on components. Then, when you get new information from previous areas, for example, IT, you should frame this further information or these recent changes in the structure you previously found. Otherwise, you're constantly reacting, doing a lot of ad hoc models. You'll have a lot of content without alignment, sense, or semantics. The first step is to contact the customer. The next step is to present the customer with some proposals because when you present the proposal to them, they may accept or reject it. If they leave it, what will you do? This flexibility allows you to generate different views of the process for different stakeholders. For example, someone in top management might want to see a view from the customer contact until the proposal. Another person might want to see everything. You can take all of the components that you have designed before and create a specific view for them. It’s only about how to design business processes. It depends on the other two. One of the primary and critical requirements is to create business processes based on specific components that are well-linked and aligned together, in order to avoid ad hoc models. Ad hoc models are not very good. They do not work in the future. Usually, people start doing this because it is easier. This is closer to how ordinary people think. Still, in the middle and long term, you will realize that it is not manageable because you have to prepare models, a visualization of things, and different models of the same reality. You will not know what the source of truth is at a certain point in time because you have many different presentations of the same fact. For me, this structure is crucial. This is where it should start: defining the system, how you will model it, and the methodology. What are the pros and cons of the method? How will you capture, model, validate, implement, and monitor the information? You must define this beforehand, at the beginning of any project. Otherwise, forget about it, regardless of your tool, because it is more about the concepts. If you don't have the right concepts, then forget about it. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is easy to maintain ARIS BPA. The solution is deployed on-cloud in our organization. ARIS BPA is a simple-to-use solution with good cloud-based support. Overall, I rate ARIS BPA an eight out of ten.

The recommendation is that the enterprise companies has to go with a solution like Aris BPA and not Visual Paradigm. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I would recommend the product to only enterprise companies because of the pricing.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I rate this solution eight out of 10.

We deployed the solution on-premises because our IT security team is very strict. We don't have any cloud solutions so far. This was one of the topics that influenced our decision to go with ARIS. Other solutions prefer the cloud or develop cloud products in a more efficient way. Our aim was to have a product that works on-premises. We do not have a lot of experience because we implemented process management, as a strategy, in 2019. Before that, processes were not really the focus of the business departments. IT had processes in mind, of course, but they only used drawing tools that were not management tools. There is now more awareness of process management in our company, not only in IT but in the business departments as well. Still, at the moment, people see it as additional work, but I hope that will get better.

In our test environment, we use version 16 of ARIS. However, in our production environment, we use version 15. We are currently doing a proof of concept project for the ARIS Risk and Compliance Manager. I believe the ARIS GRC has some potential, although it's a rather complex tool, which you definitely need to customize if you want to use it. It offers so many functions and functionalities that if you haven't had a real profound training of it, you will not really understand. So, at least in the beginning, you need to reduce the complexity of the tool. This is the approach that we took with the proof of concept project. To this point, we have not used the ARIS process mining capabilities ourselves- but did a proof of concept with SAG. The support we received was really great. We haven't used the RPA functionality (yet). We are in the pre-project implementation phase of the AI-enabled translation services. My advice for anybody who is implementing ARIS is that from a tool perspective, limit the functionality for the end-users. I strongly recommend using filters and to start small. Only allow limited functionality and a few attributes because the more complex a system you start with, the more difficult it is for a user to really understand how it is supposed to work. That said, if anybody does have problems then I recommend contacting support. I've never experienced a situation where support was not willing or was not able to help. To assist them, it may seem like a standard practice but I suggest adding screenshots because it facilitates communication with them. New users should also contribute to the ARIS community because the bigger the community is, the more powerful it is. When you have, for instance, new enhancement requests or feature requests, then this community can help to push these new features into a new release. There is room for improvement but overall, I really like working with ARIS. I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

If you start working with ARIS, first investigate very well what you want to achieve. You can use it for different kinds of goals. You need to know what you have and what you want to achieve. Then you have to create a setup. So the requirements are quite important to the design, before you start working with the tool. That's the most important thing you need to do. The tool functions quite well and you can put every process in it, but it's also important to look at your organization and make sure that people are willing to work with processes. That means you have to do some educating, in addition to the technical solution ARIS provides. Be sure that all the management positions participate in describing their processes and that managers encourage their teams to work in and use ARIS, and to do their work in the way things are described. There are these kinds of change-management issues to be aware of. The fact that ARIS has the largest BPM community worldwide is not that important to me, because I don't use it very much. I only use it to pose some technical questions. I have used some other frameworks, such as the eTOM APQC Frameworks. So I generally get my knowledge from other sources, rather than from the ARIS community. When I came into the company, I immediately started to implement ARIS, so I don't have a clear view of how things were done before. But everybody in our organization is more and more aware that we should use ARIS and that we are benefiting from it, although I can't clearly define the benefit compared to how things used to be. I'm very happy with the ARIS solution. The ARIS Advanced product we have would work quite well for most of the companies. A very big company, like a multinational, might want to have something that is on-premises, and to customize it a little bit, but for most companies, what we have is good enough.

I rate ARIS BPM six out of 10.

The process could be so simple. The question for the business units is always, "Okay, let's think about this." If the process is what we brought into ARIS, then how can we make it better? They shall use their brain and time to improve and think about their business. ARIS is only a tool. They should not be focused on, "Oh, how can I work with this tool? I'm so confused." Everything should not go into the tool. They should use their brain and energy to think about their business. We are still developing our process management method. We are still using it, but we are also improving it to get it more integrated, have more detail, and have process management be more connected with our internal control system. It was hard to do process management on a yearly cycle on an annual basis. It was helpful for us to have ARIS as a tool for this, but we also learned that it is a really complex job to do process management through the year on such a high quality level. You have to think about a lot of questions. These are all processes approved every year. All the stuff seen is, "Okay, I have to do that, and I have to do that. I have to check that they looked it through for the first half of the year. Then, they have to do the rest in the second half of the year." All this gets operationalized. With this tool, we now had process lists that we could deal with. You need a clear aim to reach for and it should not be too big. You should separate it in some way. If you want to do more than one thing, then handle it as if you want to reach for aim one, two, and three. This makes it easier than doing big bang projects where you never get to an end. Separate your aims and focus on them. For example, we started with different starting times. In September 2020, we started risk management. In November, we then started with the internal control systems. Step by step, we are now pulling our process management up. We are still improving on the methods. This solution has been my baby the last three years, so I would rate it as 10 (out of 10) because I gave everything to make it the best.

I would rate Bizagi a nine out of ten and Aris BPA, a seven out of ten.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give ARIS BPM an eight.

It has been in the market for the last 20 to 25 years, so it has most of the capabilities. I would rate ARIS BPM an eight out of ten as an architectural tool.

My advice is to try different BPM providers and download the demo for 30/90 days to see if it meets your organization's needs. A basic tool means that you will outgrow it quickly, whereas top-end solutions may be too costly and difficult to implement.

I would recommend ARIS BPM depending upon the use case. I would generally recommend Vtenext first. I found Vtenext on GitHub as I was looking through and trying out lots of BPMN and BPA stuff. I used their product, and it is a really good product. We've now partnered with them. I would rate ARIS BPM an eight out of ten.

My advice for anybody who is implementing ARIS BPM is to have a good organization in place first. You really need to have ownership because if you implement ARIS and start using it there you have quite a few admin functions that you need to have in place. For example, looking at conventions, filtering, reports, account management, etc. There's a lot of work to be done and ownership in this regard is very important. In summary, this is a good product but there is room for improvement in several areas. I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I definitely recommend the product to users seeking this kind of solution, especially for the architecture practice. If you want to have a knowledge base or a repository for architects it is very good for an overview of the enterprise architecture. Normally in a new business venture — that being a business case, a new software offering, or a new capability — the new process needs to be introduced to an existing architecture. Companies will already have a mature backend with legacy applications and integrations. It is good to keep a repository of the development to make sure that the history of that evolution stays within the company's knowledge base for later reference. On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate the ARIS BPM solution overall as a product as probably an eight-out-of-ten. It is not rated higher because the user interface is not as modern as other modeling tools like Bizagi, which looks nice. With ARIS you are quite limited when it comes to the look and feel. That issue with look-and-feel becomes more important when you try to present something to executives. When it looks like your ten-year-old has done something to present in grammar school, it is not the right thing to be showing at a high-level meeting. The content is all there, but it just looks like it is just scraped together rather than properly designed.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10.

I would advise anyone to consider the pricing model first. ARIS BPM is one of the good tools which offers BPM functionality. We are planning to go the route of attaching documents so they can upload them. In this way, we will be able to meet our needs where they are located so we can print and use materials. ARIS BPM is a good program. It's one of the leaders in the management of business processes. They should consider centralizing the team and the management of their business processes. I would give ARIS BPM an eight to nine out of ten. If I rate at ten then I would be overlooking the problems that we have experienced over the years. There's still room for improvement. ARIS BPM needs to improve scripting to make it as easy to use as possible so that they give you support on most of the elements that you generate on the go.

I would recommend this product because it is really easy to use. This is a good solution, but it needs better integration with external tools and it is expensive. I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.