What needs improvement with Signavio Process Manager?

There are a lot of challenges with Process Manager. For example, we wanted to create a process map from an Excel sheet, but Signavio doesn't have that capability. I have raised this issue with Signavio support, but it is one of the bottlenecks we are currently facing. The solution has helped us a bit to optimize our process, but not fully. Another disadvantage is that if you want to connect with SAP Solution Manager, you have to purchase a different license. They should have one tool that provides an end-to-end solution, instead of having it in bits and pieces. If it could be sold as one package, that would be really helpful. In addition, Signavio doesn't support uploading process maps, the graphs, from Visio. If you have something customized in Visio, the pics are not in a compatible format. Signavio is way behind its competitors. I don't know how things are operating since SAP took over Signavio, but there are a lot of areas where they have to improve. Those features I mentioned are needed now because of the global pandemic with people working from home. I have given a lot of feedback to the Signavio support team and it seems they're working on it, but we have not received a solution that fully satisfies what we need.

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.

There is a need for more varied access packages. The access packages that I have used are not cheap enough. They also provide a complete set of tools that are not always used. Sometimes, you need more segregated things, e.g., Signavio includes functionality for a company that has not yet matured. Since there are no basic packages, the company must pay for a package that is not fully used. Typically, process management is started in a company of a certain maturity.

The user management functionality in Process Manager is not as user friendly as the one in the Collaboration Hub. The design, although good compare to other solutions on the market, is not as great as that of the Collaboration Hub. Furthermore, the integration with SharePoint Online doesn't offer the same benefits as the one with SharePoint classic, meaning that when using the search functionality of "search in content" you will not get results of the text within the SharePoint Online documentation.

Typically, a business process management suite would cover the whole lifecycle, from discovery to optimization and operations. This is running on the process server and providing some kind of low-code environment for developing business solutions. I think the latter part is missing, where SAP Connector comes in. Specifically, the execution of processes is missing, where you would design forms to take orders. This is typically part of some development environment for the process server to run processes from out of the models.

More Machine Learning and data algorithms for predictions could be involved in order to get a better understanding of the whole structure and tool. It could be more flexible from a customization point of view, where the user is able to display only whatever he needs. More flexibility in the visualization, especially on the main page of the Collaboration Hub, would make it easier. I would like it to show cycles and other things, rather than just boxes and arrows, in a more creative way.

It is missing workflow functions. The actor's email is stored in maps, which makes it unusable. The reporting is too slow and there is a limit of 250 processes. There are not many reports available. The governance report is only available on the dashboard. There is no metadata and everything is on a map level. Process owners have to be entered into a single map! There is no functionality for variants of processes. There is no "To Be" process functionality. We have established a time-consuming workaround. The copy function is only a one to one process if you like to keep your revisions/versions. Folders cannot be copied. The number of bugs has increased a lot and it is still rising.

There are no major features missing from Signavio. Nevertheless, I would like to see an improved navigation feature in the Collaboration Hub. The current user experience for navigating between different process levels could be more intuitive. Navigation over the process structure is possible but requires a few additional clicks. Moreover, the functionality to show different process variations with "views" could be improved to allow more customization of these views. I believe this would increase the user experience and administrative efforts maintaining these process variations.

* There are some small graphical bugs, but they are addressed immediately by Signavio to their product development team. * The Stanard process model based on best practices would be helpful. Especially if there are no processes in place already to have an outside view on best practice models. * Document management system to mange templates, checklists, work instructions. upload is possible but no version control etc. Signavio is not a document management tool yet. * Focus also on other big ERP solutions (not just SAP).

Signavio already offers a wonderful range of functions. If variant management and customer journeys are optimized, Signavio can definitely bask in the glory of BPM tools. We also see optimization potential in the management of licenses, e.g. no named users but rather floating licenses and integration into the company's active directory. Especially in the area of workflow accelerators, where processes are automated and users are only involved on a monthly basis, named user licenses to become extremely expensive.

The licensing model could be better.

I think where there is always room for improvement is the capability of integration with other solutions. For example, if we develop in SAP, or we have an SAP component that serves our data models we would like to integrate that. We model our central data dimensions and components in the SAP product. As far as I know, we currently have no direct integration with that to Signavio. We have integration to LeanIX that is providing our system landscape into Signavio. If we had one piece to provide us all of our data components in a more integrated way, it would be better.

As a standard user, I would really like to have more flexibility in the visualization, especially on the main page of the Collaboration Hub to make it easier. I would like it to show cycles and other things, rather than just boxes and arrows. I would like to be able to include images in the documentation.

Part of the product that I think can improve is document control. That's currently not even possible. To work with documents we have something of a workaround using SharePoint. We made a SharePoint site with Nintex workflow in the background. I think if it could be possible to implement the document control right in Signavio it would become a very fulsome tool for a company. But right now we will just live with that workaround.

One thing I'd like to see changed and improved — bearing in mind we do not use the full functionality — is custom reporting. One thing that I found is in order to get us mobilized, get the processes modeled and get the right information out, we have had to use the API to create some custom reports. I would say making the creation of custom reports easier for the end-user could make it a more versatile solution.

The user interface for the collaboration hub is antiquated and should be improved. It feels sort of 90s and I think there is more that can be done with it. I would like to see more support for targeting efforts in terms of resources. One of the things we've done for ourselves is added an attribute to indicate where the process is from. This means that we can do a bit of a heat map of where we've got processes modeled and where we haven't. This gives us the ability to target particular areas of the business. There could be something more on the reporting side of it for the processes you have captured or processes that might be work in progress to see where to target your effort because you don't always have lots of resources to spare. So it's more around targeted efforts.

We've seem previews of the new 'Velocity Edition' which is the latest release and we are looking forward to deploying the process performance dashboards in the Collaboration Hub. The solution can enable us to carry out the entire process improvement life cycle from a central hub. We use the Lean Six Sigma methodology for improving processes, but there isn't specific functionality in the solution, at present, to support this. More support for process improvement methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma would be good. We are trying to get help to up-skill our modelers and show us how to use it fully. I have worked in many different organisations and have always had a vision of trying to improve processes and having a solution like this that ticks all of the boxes.

We would like a better way to give users the correct permissions for processes, whether to view or design. At the moment, we have to click on every account and assign the permissions based on what they need to see. Better documentation to explain the functionality would assist us with increasing the adoption in other departments within our organization.

Signavio Process Manager needs to have an integrated document management system to better work with processes that rely heavily on documents and document flows. If Signavio would create something like an external collaboration tool then it would definitely help us to communicate with externals about our processes in terms of what we need and what we expect from them. I would like to see the capability for replies to comments within the collaboration hub, as opposed to only a series of comments that may or may not be related. That would be great.

The only thing I would really like to change is notifications. The collaboration and commenting features are great. However, I think it would be more useful for people to get notifications of comments straight away so we can react even quicker to them than we already can.

The user administration, the user-group administration, and the license models need improvement. In discussions with other departments or people, a problem that I always have is the license models. They are called licenses.

We sometimes experience downtime or a dropped connection, so I think that the stability can be improved for the SaaS solution.

There are a few bugs when you use the Microsoft Surface Hub with the big screen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I find it difficult to figure out how I can better align this solution with my KPIs. I would like to combine the most important KPIs in our processes together with the main Signavio tools.

I would like to have the option to select the color of items and subgroups in the glossary because right now it is fixed. This is something that is really annoying for me. For example, roads are red, and red is a color for danger. I would prefer to choose my own color. We would like to see support for using languages other than English because we use this platform in Poland, China, and Germany. Having to work in English is ok, but not everybody speaks it.

There are two main features I like to see implemented/further developed in the SaaS solution, which would bring a great value to our present business case. On the first hand, I would like to see the inclusion of some document management functionalities. Even though Signavio focusses on process management, processes are often accompanied by loads of documents. With our current solution, we link the DMS system with Signavio, nevertheless, an embedded solution of DMS with Signavio would certainly bring more benefits and better operability to the overall solution and its end-users. On the other hand, a more user-friendly solution could be targeted with process standards and process variants compromising the overall process architecture. On the level of the process manager, it would be very convenient if standardized processes / or standardized parts of processes could be treated differently from process variants and be "marked" as such. Especially if standardized process parts are implemented in completely different (end-to-end) processes, a marginal change of the standardized part would be translated in all those other processes, where the standard process part is implemented. In the current status, process modularization needs to be performed, where the standardized parts are linked to from any other (end-to-end) process. On top of this, reports could be drawn to measure the % of standardization across all processes, including also standardized process parts in the analysis instead of just those processes, which are standardized end-to-end.

If you're going to use the tool the way I'm using it, which is to work with businesses and capture what they're thinking, it would be helpful to be able to insert other objects onto a diagram. At the moment, there are the different symbols you can use with different features of BPMN, but if I wanted to cut and paste a slide or some images to help us show them, "This is what you gave me. This is how I've changed it into this," you can't do that. You can't superimpose images or other things into their graphic. I understand that it works well as a best practice for capturing a process, but as a communication tool, that would help.

I would like to see more predictive analytics. The tool already has all the process maps, but it could offer a more proactive improvement offering. For example, they could put a little bit more machine learning behind it.

It is sometimes difficult to find the match between what is possible and what is wanted, or what is helpful with the product, so better documentation may assist in this regard. On the website, it is not clear how it is that I can upgrade to the Velocity Edition.

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.

For me, given I've got a lot of experience working with BPMN and other process management tools, in terms of the interface, I think there's a little bit more that can be improved to match what the conventional BPMN offers. I've been constantly trying to give this feedback to Signavio, to let them know that it needs to be more coherent with the original BPMN version of the stencil.

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.

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 what I have experienced when I worked with a process team, we would like to work with dummy process diagrams. Right now, I don't know if I would set up a process as a dummy since it very often gets mixed up with diagrams in production. There are many process diagrams linked to the production environment. I would like to have some kind of sandbox to work with. That would be very good. I don't even know if they already have it, but I would certainly like that.

I would like to see more integration with the process manager in terms of the workflow accelerator.

As we have only used the product for six months, it's too soon to tell what we'd like to see added in the future besides getting the solution fully deployed. At this point, we haven't fully explored the full functionality but it's got things like process manning capability and intelligence capability which we haven't even tapped into yet.

The Signavio Process Manager is a middle-range solution that is also capable of process simulation and workflow management. Whilst it may not be as strong as other products for certain tasks; For example, simulation-wise, it is probably not as strong as SIMUL8 Process Simulation Software. For complex workflow management, it's probably not as strong as Appian. It represents good value for money with strong performance. If you wish to build a process-centric business from scratch then I think this product would be ideal. The Customer Journey Map is fairly new to the whole industry, and I think that Signavio has been supporting it for a couple of years now. The vector-based graphics library for the Customer Journey Map is a little limiting.

It could use a better user interface, one that is more efficient.