IDS-Scheer, I hear what you´re saying. ARIS Express is not meant for professional users in enterprise settings. I appreciate the initiatives with a free of charge and easy to use process modelling tool. I just have one question (or comment) about your marketing/distribution strategy.
In this forum you have given the members of the ARIS Community to evaluate Express. All of us are already familiar with BPM and have a lot of thoughts about it. In that case this forum is a great way for you to get a professional point of view as well as valuable discussions. My question is that if ARIS Express is meant as a tool for users entering the BPM space, how will you reach the users who should enter the BPM space and reap the benefits of basic BPM? Those people are defintetly not signed up in this community. I would assume that their feedback is as important as the BPM-proffesionals. Best regards
Hi Peter,
you are touching a very valid point. BPM is something not everyone will consider important to successfully run a business. Also, there are many misconceptions about the topic saying that it is a heavy-weight approach creating a lot of useless paper work.
Here, everyone interested in the topic has to step in and try to convince potential users. Of course we will also launch a marketing campaign targeted at such entry users, but in the end we only have limited resources. Therefore, it is important that everyone helps a little bit by bringing up the topic while talking to potential users, blogging about it, and sharing experience.
Cheers,
Sebastian
Thu, 08/06/2009 - 09:35
How should we introduce Express for our clients is really very important question … as a tool for modelling it rather miserable, so as for methodology/tools trainings Express is also useless (IMHO). There is a lot of rumor around Express, because its idea of free tool is real great. But in present condition of Express (even if it supports import to BA) it can be competetive only with MS Visio
Hi All,
I dont think ARIS EXpress is a useless tool. There are lot of benifits of having ARIS Express. The biggest benifit is that it helps to a great extent to make BPM more popular. For example till yesterday it was not possible for a Business Owner or a Busienss Process Expert do any process modeling as such. It is possible to make hirerachies of process using ARIS Express. Using this feature we can always develop a use case and show it to the Business Owners and make them realise the benifits of a modeling tool in a better way.
One more big advantage of ARIS Express is that it can be used to develop modeling skills in your organisation, previously it was only possible by first buy ARIS Prodcuts. Now any one can get a good feel about process modeling.
IDS Scheer is also a organisation and they also need to survie which they cant by offering the full fetured solution for free.
Just to let you know i'm not a employee of IDS SCheer but a passionate BPM Consultant. who is very happy about teh initiatives IDS Scheer it taking to make BPM Sucessful.
Thanks
Dinesh Ghanta
Hi,
I think that it's interesting initiative, but not very useful. First, there is no BPMN in Aris Express. And we all BPM people ;), know that it's a notation at least equally well known as EPC. I suppose that every businness expert, who doesn't know much about BPM standards and tools, will look at wiki and see BPMN charts. Or 'google' some BPM blogs, and surprise - BPMN is the hottest topic. So, he/she will expect to have BPMN in the modelling tool ...
Second thing is the process analysis - probably the main benefit of process modelling. With ARIS Express we can only talk about this, and promise that commercial Aris tool will do all the analysis, model and object management, and so on. But there is nothing to show in Aris Express - even as simple as time/cost attributes in activities and possibility to summarize them per process in the simpe report.
So, it's nice looking drawing tool, quite good for absolute beginners, but very soon they will scream for more ;)
Hi Sebastian,
Uuups, I missed this info about BPMN. Thanks.
But the second point is still valid ;) It would be great for freelancer consultant to do a proof of concept for process improvement with Aris Express. I mean - to draw some processes, provide some time and cost information, then give this to the client to create process variants and generate simple analysis. From my experience it's an important point - the client sees the models and ask 'what can I do with this pictures to have a quick effect? And why it's better than Visio drawings?'. So, I want to show and to involve the customer in something more, before I tell the whole story about process automation, great model management and lot's of other features of full version.
Maybe it's to much to expect such functionality in a free tool ... but maybe it's worth considering in future releases. Of course it depends on your targeted audience, for example if it's primarily medium-large organisations, we can assume that the consultants involved simply have a full version of ARIS in their toolset ;)
Regards
Robert
