We performed a comparison between ARIS BPA and erwin Data Modeler by Quest based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Business Process Design solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."You can relate different aspects of an organization to each other, and you can clearly define the rates seen in the application."
"The whole ARIS BPM solution is a bit special, because from the very beginning it was targeted more to Business users and the Management."
"ARIS provides the basic foundation for any digital transformation an organization decides to take."
"The EPC modeling is very detailed, the semantic check is helpful, and auto-layout simplifies the formatting."
"The matrix model makes building relations easier."
"It has helped me get some ideas across more clearly to my colleagues."
"The ease of use is the most valuable. I have tried a number of BPMN packages, and I find the user interface of ARIS BPM easier and more intuitive than others. If your team is knowledgeable on BPMN, it is really pretty easy to figure out on your own because it adheres to the standards extremely well. I have tried Bizagi, BizFlow, and a variety of such solutions, and I just liked ARIS BPM better."
"I like everything about ARIS BPA. I've used it for a long time and it's a fantastic tool. There is a list of things ARIS has that other solutions do not have."
"The principal feature that I liked is that the solution has a very graphic interface."
"We had some data integration projects, where we needed to integrate it for about 100 databases. Doing that manually is crazy; we can't do that. With erwin, it was much easier to identify which tables and columns could be used for the integration. That means a lot in terms of time and effort as well as my image to the customer, because they can see that we are providing value in a very short time."
"It is a scalable solution...The technical support team is fine."
"The most valuable features are the ability to reverse engineer and do model comparison. With the reverse engineering, I can understand the databases from third-party products. With the model comparison, I can track the differences between two versions of the same database."
"It reduces monthly savings by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Think about a company like Costco and all of the points of sale systems in Costco, all of the systems, the applications, but if all the applications in Costco all had their own data model, trying to integrate those, upgrade them and manage their different versions of the same model throughout the store, is an absolute nightmare. It's phenomenally expensive. This helps reduce that cost significantly. I'm talking on the orders of hundreds of thousands of dollars."
"It has centralized storage so that a data model can be shared by different teams."
"It allows us to create logical data models. We can represent a database model in business terms, which is very useful for us."
"The solution's ability to compare and synchronize data sources with data models is fantastic. We use it for that on a regular basis to make sure that changes haven't been made to the database outside of the modeling process. I can take existing databases and reverse engineer them and understand their structure within 15 minutes. If I didn't have Data Modeler it would take hours. It increases our productivity and helps in understanding our legacy application."
"ARIS BPA is not really a platform that offers you the opportunity to execute processes that you model."
"Areas for improvement include sales, prospecting, shopping, customer service, after-sales (claims and advice for the client), and all processes pertaining to customer loyalty."
"The solution is difficult and not very exciting to learn."
"The workflow approval process could be represented better in the overviews."
"It needs external API and the ability to navigate back, similar to "Back" in web browser."
"Integration with third-party tools should be improved (e.g. based on APIs)."
"In terms of improvement, the app could use some small details and functionalities."
"The reporting capabilities and the ability to create custom reports need to be simplified and made easy so that people even with a good functional understanding of the tool can leverage it to create their own custom report."
"The navigation is a little bit of a challenge. It's painful. For example, if you've got a view open and you want to try to move from side to side, the standard today is being able to drag and drop left and right. You can't really do that in the model. Moving around the model is painful because it doesn't follow the Windows model today."
"Some Source official systems give us DDLs to work with and they have contents not required to be part of the DDL before we reverse engineer in the erwin DM. Therefore, we manually make changes to those scripts and edit them, then reverse-engineer within the tool. So, it does take some time to edit these DDL scripts generated by the source operational systems. What I would suggest: It would be helpful if there were a place within the erwin tool to import the file and automatically eliminate all the unnecessary lines of code, and just have the clean code built-in to generate the table/data model."
"I would like to have more data sources from other, different vendors. In recent years, the vendor has reduced the number of data sources, and I would like to have more data sources for every brand. For example, with Oracle, I would like to have compatibility for many versions, including old ones, not just the most recent."
"It is not a very stable solution. I rate the stability five out of ten."
"I would like the solution to be less rigid in terms of its theory."
"The report generation has room for improvement. I think it was version 8 where you had to use Crystal Reports, and it was so painful that the company I was with just stayed on version 7 until version 9 came out and they restored the data browser. That's better than it was, but it's still a little cumbersome. For example, you run it in erwin, then export it out to Excel, and then you have to do a lot of cosmetic modification. If you discover that you missed a column, then you would have to rerun the whole thing. Sometimes what you would do is just go ahead and fix it in the report, then you have to remember to go back and fix it in the model. Therefore, I think the report generation still could use some work."
"I find the UI very clunky and very difficult to use. If I add columns to a table the whole workflow could be so much easier. I get frustrated using it. I've tried other tools. I've tried to get off of erwin a few times. I always come back to it because every tool has its own set of problems, and it seems like if I have to pick my poison, I stay with erwin. But so many things that are clunky with it."
"I still use Visio for conceptual modeling, and that's mainly because it is easier to change things, and you can relax some of the rules. DM's eventual target is a database, which means you actually have to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts, but in a conceptual model, you don't often know what you're working with. So, that's probably a constraint with erwin. They have made it a lot easier, and they've done a lot, but there is probably still room for improvement in terms of the ease of presentation back to the business. I'm comparing it with something like Visio where you can change colors on a box, change the text color and that sort of stuff, and change the lines. Such things are a whole lot easier in Visio, but once you get a theme organized in erwin, you can apply that theme to all of the objects. So, it becomes easier, but you do have to set up that theme."
ARIS BPA is ranked 3rd in Business Process Design with 64 reviews while erwin Data Modeler by Quest is ranked 9th in Business Process Design with 37 reviews. ARIS BPA is rated 8.4, while erwin Data Modeler by Quest is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of ARIS BPA writes "I can usually find an answer to my issue on ARIS Community". On the other hand, the top reviewer of erwin Data Modeler by Quest writes "The product lets users import different types of models, but it is expensive, and the interface must be improved". ARIS BPA is most compared with SAP Signavio Process Manager, ADONIS, Camunda, Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect and Bizagi, whereas erwin Data Modeler by Quest is most compared with SAP PowerDesigner, IDERA ER/Studio, Lucidchart, Visio and Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect. See our ARIS BPA vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest report.
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