The initial setup was complex. The actual installation of the product is easy but the configuration of the product is complex. It's necessarily complex because it's a database and it has all these options that you can set. You need to create all of your database objects and you need to create your entire website on top of the database. It's not a turnkey solution where you take it out of the box and it works. It requires a lot of decisions and a lot of guidance.

It's a matter of once you get it up and running, what are you going to do with it? When you buy a new house and go to a home goods store, you can buy all of the stuff for your kitchen, the tools and the spatulas, etc. And then you can buy all the food. Now, how are you going to make a gourmet meal out of it? It takes you a long time to figure that out.

We also installed it a long time ago, so I want to emphasize that my experience is not current experience on the configuration.

Our deployment took about three months. We deployed it on Windows machine on-premise. At first, we deployed it on 10 people's laptops, and we deployed another server — the web front-end — for the rest of the employees. We had two servers with databases running on-premise on Windows. Only recently, in about the last two years, did we pick that whole thing up and move it to Google Cloud. We didn't really do any transformation. We just lifted and shifted it to the cloud.

For deployment and maintenance of the solution we need just one person, and the maintenance part is about a quarter of a person. Once you have it up and running, there's not too much maintenance, other than the data, just like any system. We have 10 people who are maintaining the data, but they only work on it probably 10 percent of the time. So one full-time employee is needed to update the data and a quarter to a half of an employee to maintain the technology.

We had a consultant who did the setup for us. It was completely on their shoulders to get us up and configured. We simply have a desktop tool, a remote access link, that gets us to the server. We log on and we're off and running. It's been working very well. It wasn't complicated at all because I didn't have to get involved with the installation and the setup at the server-side. We pay a fee for that service so we don't have to have anyone on our side who knows all about the server setup.

Deployment, including training, took a week. We trained in about four days and then went back to our workstations and off we went.

The strategy was to have our groups, one in DC, one in West Virginia, and the one where I work in Columbus, Ohio be able to work collectively and collaboratively. That's what we are able to do. That was one of the big criteria.

In the beginning, it was not that complex, but it depends on your maturity and on what you want to modernize. That's what defines the complexity of what you are doing. We were backed up by Professional Services. Without them, we wouldn't have managed to make it simple.

It took less than three months to deploy it, and we are continuously improving it.

As for our implementation strategy, before this we had ARIS BPM and all our business processes were in PowerPoint or Excel. The application was described in our ARIS system and we decided to define a new meta-model inside erwin and migrate after that. For the description of our IT systems we created a project with our provider regarding what they were documenting in their CMDB. We launched the system after migrating all the stuff, and after that we made a change-management plan. So we had to connect to the legacy, clean the data, and start with the project.

I did the initial setup. The deployment was very fast.

The initial setup is quite fast compared to other tools on the market. After a day or two day of training, it's quite easy to really get into the tool to manage and develop it.

Each time we want to get into more complex features. We need to dig in to understand them. Their user guides for this can be improved.

Our implementation strategy took a big longer. The way we did it, we ensured to involve all our key stakeholders who were contributing data during the design phase. So, they were able to influence the way we were designing the data modeling and so on.

To ensure that the stakeholders were aware and familiar with the tool's usage, we did a trial version. When looking at the trial version, we considered whether we could add some capabilities. For example, could we adapt the user interface to be more user-friendly? Also, adding integration of our solution to the CMDB.

The initial setup process is straightforward.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. You can do a lot of customization, so you can get pretty deep into it. But it did not seem overly complex to me.

The project itself took about nine months, but a lot of that was gathering the content, not just the deployment of applications.

We did everything in a development environment and then, once we tested it, we made the changes to  the production environment. 

We had held in-person training and published micro-learning videos to help with rollout.

Complexity lies in connectivity and supporting tool setup - which isn’t always intuitive.

Setting up Evolve is straightforward, and you can maintain the solution with one person depending on the size of your operation. If you are developing an enterprise-level data model, you may need a small team.

Installation is straightforward.

The initial setup was not a big deal, I don't remember it being terribly painful. They sent us links which we accessed, then we were in the tool. It was pretty simple.

Setting up Evolve is complex, so you should get training and certification. 

The implementation process is too complicated.

Straightforward

The initial setup was really straightforward and the deployment was done within one day. 

The ERwin setup is very simple.