ARIS BPA Valuable Features

Libor Černý - PeerSpot reviewer
Process manager at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I like working with ARIS because I have some experience with it. I understand what is on the forums. I know how the user interface works, how to create a repository, and stand up this tool.

I am an advanced user. ARIS BPM is intuitive for me because I know the UML, BPMN, and EPC methodologies implemented in this tool. It is very easy to create processes for restructuring a company with some descriptions. 

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Laurent Salembier - PeerSpot reviewer
DSI Functions Support at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees

Aris BPA is a very comprehensive and intuitive solution. I like the user experience very much, including the user interface. The ARIS platform is really an enterprise solution that eases the collection of all aspects of a company. ARIS has made a huge improvement, in terms of the user experience and intuitiveness. If I compare the very first version that I used in my previous company and the one that we are using now at my current company, there really is a big difference, big changes, and big improvements.

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BP
Enterprise Architect EA Tooling (APM) at Acrostine

I like everything about ARIS BPA. I've used it for a long time and I think it's a fantastic tool. There is a list of things ARIS has that other solutions do not have.

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Buyer's Guide
ARIS BPA
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about ARIS BPA. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Keith Bohanna - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Group BPM Standards at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

ARIS by Software AG for the most part is incredibly intuitive at the mapper and business division level. We have had many cases where we work with our colleagues across the bank who have been experiencing using solutions like Visio. Once they have a core understanding of its processes from a visual sense, they can very quickly and intuitively start to use ARIS. As you get more into the complexity of the analysis, reporting, and administration, then that intuitiveness is less obvious. However, that is a case where you receive more training and are undertaking much more complex tasks. As a tool that is used by non-technical colleagues within the business division, the first line within the bank can strongly recommend it.

This solution gives us an easy way to enable visibility for our colleagues across 11 business divisions, and a couple of countries that we work in, on how the bank operates. We are in phase two of a multi-year program to build out those processes. What we are starting to do now is build out end-to-end views. As processes, data, and customer contacts span multiple parts of the bank, we are building out full end-to-end views so colleagues will have visibility across the group.

One of the many advantages of ARIS is that it is supported by a very strong BPM community, which is critical for us. Although Business Process Management has been in business for many years, it is still at an early stage of evolution. There are so many instances where your specific use case or requirement for using ARIS hasn't necessarily been matured across the sector. So, you need access to a very active community to help you explore possible solutions and ways in which ARIS can be used to achieve those use cases.

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Cirvesh-Daga - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at T-Systems International GmbH

The product still does what it does well, which is why it's popular. But, the user interface sucks.

ARIS has a good collaboration function. You create a portal where any authorized users can work on the models. There are simple flows for making and approving changes. 

If approved, you can deploy them directly through ARIS. It's a basic but functional collaboration tool, suitable for small teams. It might not scale well for large modeling teams.

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Regina Janitsch - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager Organization and Process Management at OeKB

The browser-based modeling tool is very awesome. It's very easy for the people who use it. One of our aims was and is to use ARIS in a decentralized way. That means we want our business departments to be able to publish their processes and to evaluate risk and controls. For that purpose, we have ARIS BPA and ARCM, which are connected. We model the risks and controls on the process diagrams, and the evaluation of risks and controls take place in ARCM.

ARIS BPA provides very good visibility and control of processes because we have a concurrent license system. As a result, every person in our company and group is able to look at the published processes. We have also built a tree from a process map so that people can navigate through different steps to the process model itself. That works quite well.

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AL
Managing Director at Optus

The EPC modeling is very detailed, the semantic check is helpful, and auto-layout simplifies the formatting.

The process interface is valuable for identifying the upstream and downstream processes.

The approval process for the ARIS EPC from the design, staging, and production environment is pretty good. You can obtain feedback on the process model; however, this functionality seems a bit limited by today's standard as some other BPM allows you to comment on the objects within the process model, which makes gathering feedback and making changes easier.

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Nikola Dlaka - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BPM Consultant/Solution architect at DNA Consulting

The most valuable features of ARIS BPA are its flexibility and reporting. You can use the solution to customize the whole set of objects and models. If you know a bit of programming, you can easily pull out or get data in ARIS BPA. You can even integrate the solution with other systems. The solution now has a REST API, which provides a lot of possibilities as the reporting does, but it's not quite there yet. We still depend a bit on the reports to integrate with other systems or fetch data from ARIS BPA very easily.

It's really a unified repository, and it's quite easy to configure and set up. Compared to other tools, the solution has good modeling, analysis, and visualization of processes. Currently, it has a really good process portal with a lot of nice functionalities. With the solution's search functionality, people can easily find processes relevant to them or where they are involved as someone executing some parts of the process or interfacing with another process.

A gas and oil company with oil rigs concluded that in the past, they had procedures always documented in some Word or PDF documents. It was really hard for people working on those rigs to follow these processes. They often disregarded or couldn't find relevant documentation. ARIS BPA improved their situation. People found it much easier to go to the portal, find their process, and link in more condensed documents. We can link some checklists to that activity. They find it much easier and user-friendly to follow and comply with the processes.

With the solution's process portal, you can present the whole content, and the users in the company can see how the process looks and what their roles are in the process. One company could even see screens of the applications that they need to use for that particular step in the process. It increases the documentation and serves as a knowledge base for the company employees on how to execute their processes.

ARIS BPA is a good solution for documenting and analyzing processes. We are really happy with the solution's reporting and documentation capabilities.

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Vikas Mheoe - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, ERP Deployment at Johnson Controls, Inc.

My experience with the product was great. The tool has good navigation.

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Mansoor Adenwala - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager - Process and Project Management at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I value the reporting as well as the information query features, they are both very useful. It gives us a common language and a common repository, and we're able to control the workflow and relevant key processes. We're also able to utilize all the additional data that we capture and provide a holistic view of how our processes impact other areas of the organization.

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BPMexp67 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at iMendos
Veronika Ellermann - PeerSpot reviewer
BPM Method and Tools Specialist at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

ARIS is very user-friendly compared to other BPM tools that I have used. The user has a really modern view when they're using the ARIS Connect platform, which is the web-based part of the application.

In general, the users really like it and they can get started using it very easily.

For some people, ARIS is quite intuitive when it comes to business process management and modeling. In the time that I have spent training people, I have found that there are two mindsets. If somebody is a very organized and structured person then it will be relatively easy to get started with ARIS. However, if somebody is more creative then it tends to be quite difficult for them. That said, these people would have the same difficulty when using other process management tools. The reason is that process management is about structure. For those with that type of mindset, it's really easy to get started.

As an administrator with several years of experience with ARIS, I find that getting end-users set up is a really easy thing to do.

I really like the large variety of functionality that ARIS provides. If you look at it from a methodology perspective, you have more than 100 different diagrams or model types that you can choose from. It's really flexible in all of your modeling needs.

You can easily model process diagrams, but you can also model bowtie diagrams, UML diagrams, and more. ARIS has a really wide range of functionality. 

I really like the EPC modeling because it allows you to model not only the doer's perspective, which is often done with BPMN notation, but it also allows you to model the contributors or the people who are accountable or informed in your processes. When it comes to manual processes or semi automatic processes, this is really useful because this is where you can improve a lot.

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Andi Frei - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Process and Data Leader Fabrics Division at W.L. Gore & Associates

ARIS BPA has the kind of database structure to report from across all the models, roles, and systems. The solution provides integrations to ServiceNow and other systems, flexibility of connectivity, and reporting.

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KH
Interprise Architect/Chief Architect/Project, Portfolie manager at KLH-Consulting

The good thing about using this tool is the repository that gives us the opportunity: If you want to do modeling with the old notation form, ours was EPC, you can use the same object in the BPMN because the database is built in a way that you can use both things. So you only have to define it once, and if the notation form is BPMN and those kind of activities, you can use the same EPCs, so there is a connection between them. That is why it's a very flexible tool.

Furthermore, you can use this tool as an enterprise architect tool. So from an architectural point of view, when you're looking at the business area, you can find all the information you have to use as an architect.

The most important part of it, from my point of view - the way I work with it - is from an architect point of view. What I'm using it to handle, from the top-level management part, is where we talk about the strategy, then down to the business part, down to the information part, down to the application part, and to the technology part. So I use everything in the tool.

But, if you have to see it from a BPMN prospect, it will be the BPMN part of it. 

Also, the UML parts have been improved very much in the last two years. And it's very powerful now to combine the BPMN and UML parts in the product, because you can make a connection between them, so that you have the right interoperability between them. So if you're doing data modeling, you can use your class diagram and bind that to the BPMN part. That's a very strong part of it too. Had now implementet the Danish public ad on "Plusprofil" to the UML packed.

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BM
Consultant at KAFD DMC

It's a really nice and user-friendly tool, and we can extract different reports from it. We have had different processes modeling and everything done with the solution. With the solution, we were using it for documenting, and then now we are updating all of these. So it's been great software for everyone.

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NR
Lead Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

ARIS provides many functionalities and capabilities, including:

1. E2E visibility of the processes which are typically cross-functional

2. Multiple hierarchies of the process provides a different level of abstraction

3. Multi-dimensional view of the process can be created to further support analysis from the system, data, capability, product, interface, infrastructure et cetera.

4. Provides a single source of truth for a process consumed by different departments/functions

6. Strong governance and release cycle management with a built-in workflow

7. Process simulation capabilities to perform what-if analysis

8. Seamless collaboration using built-in mini workflows 

9. Out-of-the-box connectivity with SAP

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Michiel Overeem - PeerSpot reviewer
Process Architect at Stars and Stories Nederland B.V.

A basic feature that most other tools like ARIS BPA have as well, is a database with all of the relationships in the system. It makes it easier to have more standardized processes across the organization. The database also makes it possible to run reports and do analysis, which is kind of cool.

What also makes it good is the way we have set it up so that we not only have the processes in place, but we also have relationships specified with our IT systems and our organizational chart. That makes it possible to analyze things from the systems point of view and regarding the organizational part of the company. It all comes together in one tool and that is what gives us the most value at the moment.

We use the modeling technique called BPMN, which is a standard way of describing processes. It's independent of ARIS, but ARIS facilitates working with it. All the objects are available in ARIS, which makes it quite intuitive. For me, ARIS BPM is easy to use because I have known it for quite a long time. Others need some training before they can use it properly. They need a basic understanding of how the tool works. But overall, the intuitiveness of the solution is quite good.

Also, access to the solution is good because it's a cloud solution, and the performance is quite good. It's well-organized.

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JR
Director at Celeris Software, Inc.

The most valuable features of ARIS BPA are the centralized repository and the automatic rendering of diagrams.

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HS
Organizational Development Officer at OeKB

If you ever tried to draw a picture in a browser app or with a cloud service, it is normally a painful death. ARIS works perfectly on diagrams in the browser, so I was excited. I like it because there have been so many bad experiences in the past with drawing or doing something in a browser. Normally, it's always painful because it's coded badly. With ARIS, it is really well-implemented. It's simple. 

We only get emails if something went wrong or the semantic checks are integrated, which means you can't publish it. If there is the smallest mistake in it, then you can't publish it at all. It is only allowed to get the symbols which are permitted. Therefore, everything is perfect on the technical side, and on the control side, no mistakes are published. You can check the deep semantic process. For example, if it does not make sense, but it is formally correct. If it's correct on the technical side, but it does not make sense when you have to read it. That is the human interaction that you need. However, what is technically possible is implemented to get good results.

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DM
CEO at Exergy Energy

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.

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Victor_Sleiman - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Netways

ARIS BPA has valuable reporting capabilities.

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KK
Vice President Change Management at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

ARIS BPA has a good directory option, which helps to keep track of all of your metadata, and that's very useful.

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AJ
Principal Consultant - DPA at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

ARIS BPA provides a variety of features, however, the feature to look at the same model from a different perspective is amazing. We can show the information/view which is relevant to specific stakeholders. This also helps to avoid creating multiple views of the same model and saves a lot of time. 

Also, creating various queries, ad-hoc queries, and reports (what you see what you get) helped us in analyzing the information which is captured on these ARIS models and helped with rapid impact analysis for our application and role rationalization project.

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AP
Global Process and Control Improvement at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

The two most valuable aspects of ARIS BPA are the shared common repository and the whole governance cycle. The shared repository allows for cross-functional cooperation instead of doing things in a silo. You can operate cross-functionally and really work end-to-end, instead of dividing everything up on a functional basis. The governance element is important because functions can be managed in a controlled manner. There is a stacked database, and we can move things in a controlled manner from the development environment to the publication environment.

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Nikola Dlaka - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BPM Consultant/Solution architect at DNA Consulting

The whole ARIS BPM solution is a bit special, because from the very beginning it was targeted more to Business users and the Management. Its core focus was to, at the end provide a neat tool for the Management to use as get a grasp about their Business Processes, more easily determine their strategy and also sometimes do analysis and parametrization of the processes. This is all possible, as ARIS, unlike Visio for example utilizes a database system, where it's possible to model all kinds of relations with different metadata and information. If used with clear strategy, it can provide a really powerful tool to analyze the whole Enterprise, from IT, Processes and Organization.

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it_user97134 - PeerSpot reviewer
Responsible BPM Competence Centre with 1,001-5,000 employees

EPC is by far the best notation to process modelling form. The idea of the corporate repository with all business information connected has no competition!

The ARIS Connect Collaborative Portal is a good idea, too!

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MN
Financial System Analyst at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution is user-friendly and easy to use. 

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it_user1332093 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Architect at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

ARIS is probably the most mature product I know of in terms of modeling an enterprise architecture so that it has context. When you need to make changes to processes, there is a view where you can actually see what other processes within different use cases or different functional areas use the same process and what those changes can affect. Workflows can be used across different business areas and that gives a really good, holistic view of what modifications end up affecting.  

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AY
BPM Assistant Manager at TEB

The most valuable features are business process modeling and reporting. They show all of the business and operational processes, which are banking processes. It also allows for managing and reporting on them. The entire bank can follow and manage their own processes.

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KG
Junior Consultant at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

The platform’s most valuable feature is object reusability. It has occurrence copies, which help us reuse any object in any model.

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GS
QA Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

The solution has come up with a web portal that makes it easy to model and show to clients. 

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AK
Founder & CEO at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

There is a module designer, that one is very powerful and it creates very good reports.

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OO
Process Transformation Lead at Jaguar Land Rover
  • The reports capability
  • Object relationships
  • Architectural definitions
  • Multiple model types
  • Semantic check capabilities
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it_user743028 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Process Management Consultant and Business Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Features like SAP SolMan sync, Alfabet EA integration (another Software AG product). Also, a good defined framework for BPM or any consulting practice across any verticals or domains, whether it's TOGAF methodology, running BPM Lifecycle or Six Sigma process analysis.

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MS
Principal Consultant at Palmira

The most valuable feature is the process documentation. For us, ARIS is a lifestyle more than a tool. It helps us learn how to think and how to plan for our system.

I don't know why Software AG is saying that it's for business process management. It's an enterprise management system that connects all the documentation and business processes. 

It's not only documenting. It's about executing and developing business processes, performance management, strategic planning, and project management. Limited use cases can be used for documentation and for generating analytics to identify gaps in the organization.

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LD
Estagiária em processos

Aris BPA has a lot of tools that are more professional than Bizagi.

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BPMexp67 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at iMendos

The possibility to align Strategies, business, and IT with the architectures of support and SDLC, starting from the requirements management until the IT delivery.

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AM
Senior manager at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

The solution's basic features are easy to use, overall designed well, and it has good process mining analysis.

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EM
Manager at Entel

BPA, the modeling tool, is the main module used because of our need for documentation.

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it_user827664 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BPM Consultant, Managing Director at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

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.

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NR
Senoir consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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WR
Business Solutions at a healthcare company with 1-10 employees

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.

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it_user772149 - PeerSpot reviewer
Key Account Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

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VS
Senior Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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. 

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WT
Chief Process Officer at Netizen Co., Ltd.

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

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NR
Lead Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user758082 - PeerSpot reviewer
ARIS Senior Business Analyst/Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • Fully-reportable database over Visio
  • Heavy dashboarding with ARIS Aware
  • Automation capabilities
  • Direct SAP connection
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AC
CEO at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
  1. ARIS process modeling and analysis: It allows integration of end-to-end business processes with the organization's vision, strategies, and business objectives, through visual management.
  2. Business Process Analysis: We can simulate, optimize, and analyse business processes based on various business requirements. It assures our rolling out the best processes.
  3. Process Governance: Change management, process reviews, workflows, etc.
  4. Process Simulation: To do the various what-if analysis. 
View full review »
ND
Managing Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The most valuable feature in the latest versions is the connect portal, where you can do modeling in a very simple manner using the web-based portal.

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it_user872685 - PeerSpot reviewer
Full-Stack Developer at a engineering company with 10,001+ employees

MFT is quite attractive. A large amount of data is passed in almost no time and it is quite easy to use.

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it_user499062 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Process Management at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
  • ARIS Reporting – Helps download valuable content from the tool in multiple formats.
  • ARIS Query – Helps visualize relationships between various components/elements of an enterprise.
  • Occurrence Copy – Helps create a relational database which in turn helps in carrying out process analysis.
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MG
Business/Process Analyst at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

I am impressed with the tool's integration. It also facilitates collaboration in the organization. 

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it_user733374 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant

Platform that it supports covers legacy and new. Caters to moving older objects into an integrated DB, relatively popular ones: SQL, Oracle, etc.

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it_user708132 - PeerSpot reviewer
AVP & Head of Policies and Procedures Management Dept. at Union National Bank

The most valuable features are the leveling of processes, interfacing of processes, extracting the reports, and process manuals out of the system; the whole landscape.

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BR
Project & Process Manager at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The BPMN notation and the share flow through users. It is nice to see all flows in a common, shared space for all the stakeholders to view the same thing and the same language.

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OM
Business Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The main features we like about ARIS BPM are related to research:

  • We do a filter for meetings to make sure that people don't end up using multiple icons. 
  • We have another skill for generating models. 
  • We also use ARIS BPM for querying information to see where everything is.
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VZ
Information Security Consultant

It is a well-featured, functional product. This is its biggest feature.

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it_user268932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Manager at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
  • Adhoc analysis of enterprise blueprints
  • Collaboration and governance over enterprise artifacts
  • ARIS HOUSE concept
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ST
Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It provides the discovery functionality, and you can have a simulation on top of it to get your design corrected to ensure that it is within the right state of parameters. It is a complete package that you can use from strategy to execution because you have the design layer, and within the design, you can also do analytics.

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AB
Business Process Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The matrix model makes building relations easier.

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it_user701076 - PeerSpot reviewer
Process Analyst

The capability to integrate all information of the business and to generate simulations of processes. It can analyze the model of operations quickly.

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it_user462882 - PeerSpot reviewer
Partner / Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It is the most flexible and embracing process modeling tool.

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it_user863709 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at OAT Solutions

The simulation engine and SAP integration are technically very robust when you consider my segments of expertise (health care, financial, and automotive).

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
ARIS BPA
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about ARIS BPA. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.