ARIS: Thirty years of passion for business processes

Somehow, history never looks like history when you are living through it. And this is certainly true for ARIS’s first 30 years.

In 1992, ARIS was invented, heralding the birth of business process excellence. Ever since then, Software AG’s ARIS has been uniting business and IT and conquering the market for business process analysis. It has been helping companies to understand and improve their processes to successfully transform their businesses.

Trends come and go, but one constant has accompanied us over the years: Process excellence remains one of the most important goals in every company’s to-do list.

I have brought together two ARIS ambassadors and long-time colleagues to talk about why the passion for processes is as strong (or stronger) today as it was 30 years ago.

Karl Wagner, SVP R&D and Cloud Operations for ARIS, started as one of the first engineers in the original ARIS team, working from the first “office” – a former Fiat garage in Saarbrucken. He has been a pioneer in business process management (BPM), business process automation (BPA) and process mining software since the 1990s.

Marc Vietor got his BPM feet wet in different roles within the company over the years, gaining a lot of experience in realizing transformation projects, and is now General Manager for ARIS and Alfabet at Software AG.

Here is a sample of our conversation:

Q. Why do you think that process management and process mining are so important to companies, especially today?

MV: I think the big trend is that our customers really need to adapt to all the new requirements – whether it is resilience, like we have seen during Covid with everybody working from home, or the big technology trends like cloud migration.

Customers are more demanding: All the B2C trends are now being applied for B2B.

I think that all means you must understand your business processes. You need to know them and make them available to everyone in your organization so they can really adhere to the way they should work. Then you can measure them again to see if they are doing what they should do.

There are dozens, hundreds of regulations that they must apply, and also new ones like environmental, social and governance. There has been no time in the last few decades – or will be in the future 100 years – where processes are irrelevant.

Q. We’ve seen a lot of trends come and go, from RPA to customer experience management, but in the end it’s all about business processes. What are the next big trends?

KW: I believe that technology is about serving the needs of our customers, and for trends, I see AI and machine learning. I think what those things can do for the organization is still not understood. New business models are offering new services, and these are the trigger for enormous changes.

AI, machine learning and natural language processing may make their way into our technology and provide a better service to our customers. Files in AI are already used in our process mining, so more and more of those things will make life easier in transformation projects.

Q. Do you think business processes can save the world?

KW: I also would not underestimate what BPM and ARIS can contribute in transformation initiatives. If you look at the value chain or process chain, you optimize it towards the KPI quality, time, customer satisfaction, whatever – at the same time, you can look at it from a from a carbon and pollution angle. For sure BPM is a tool that can help companies evolve towards a more sustainable business in the future.

So, Happy Birthday ARIS and many happy returns!

To learn more about business process transformation and try ARIS for free, click below.

You can watch the video in its entirety here: