IDS Scheer: ARIS adds new features and builds partnerships

Last week saw IDS Scheer make 4 announcements at ARIS ProcessWorld 2008 in Berlin.

New Features

In the first announcement IDS Scheer, is adding new products and functions to ARIS Platform. The stated aim is that these new features should increase the operational deployment of ARIS products. The new features strengthen the operational phase and the process management process for ARIS. The focus is shifting from the design phase of IT and business processes to everyday work within processes and process monitoring, which fits with the current trends in the BPMS world. The specific additions to the ARIS product family are ARIS Governance Engine, ARIS Performance Dashboard, and an enhanced version of ARIS Business Publisher.

Key to this more widespread operational use is ARIS Governance Engine, which regulates and automates the process of process management. This tool and process environment, scheduled for release in Q1 2009, will cover a wide range of scenarios. Because it can be used to control and monitor high-level process rules, it supports efficient implementation of every type of governance process.

In addition, ARIS Performance Dashboard enables business users to leverage process-oriented business intelligence technology for their day-to-day activities at the strategic, tactical, and operational level.

Finally, the enhanced version of ARIS Business Publisher offers improved options for internal and external communication, publishing, and process management that benefit expert and non-expert ARIS users alike. The development brief includes integration of Web 2.0 technologies.

Partnership 1 – BMC Software

By linking Business Process Management from ARIS with IT Service Management from BMC Software, the aim is to provide customers with the ability to document cause-and-effect relationships between the business process and IT components and thus provide the business with valuable knowledge on the impact to a business process based on changes or events occurring to the underlying IT infrastructure.

The BMC Discovery for Business Processes product, developed by BMC in partnership with IDS Scheer, enables IT departments to automatically discover business process models from ARIS Business Architect and dynamically map them with information on IT services and infrastructure stored in the BMC Atrium CMDB solution. By this IT departments can determine which business process is affected when IT events occur and then prioritize events according to their impact on the business. This not only improves business efficiency by aligning business and IT processes, but also the communication of change requests and the compliance with regulatory standards in IT Service Management.
The new IDS Scheer product ARIS Interface for BMC Atrium CMDB closes the loop by extracting data about deployed applications and technology from the CMDB and importing into the ARIS Repository. Here it is linked to the application architecture, landscape planning information and the business processes. Enterprise architects can use this information in ARIS IT Architect to analyse the impact of IT projects to the existing landscape and evaluate the degree of standardization across software, hardware. Two users, TeamBank and TietoEnator, gave their view on the results of this partnership in terms of the effect on them.

Partnership 2 – Microsoft

IDS Scheer announced the availability of its integration of the ARIS Platform with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2. IDS Scheer is part of Microsoft Business Process Alliance. Allen Johnson, Director Partner/ Alliances at IDS Scheer said, “With this integration, companies can accelerate their return on business process management improving their business performance. They are able to seamlessly model and design business processes using ARIS, and then execute them through Microsoft BizTalk Server and respective web services.”

The integrated offering allows organisations to design, simulate and execute business process dynamically through BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and also enables Process Analytics and Intelligence to be built into the business process which in turn enables a continuous improvement capability with a dashboard for process based decision making for the business.

Partnership 3 – SAP

IDS Scheer has for a long time had a very close relationship with SAP. The announcement concerns a process-oriented consulting approach for organisation that is planning to introduce or upgrade SAP. “Process-Driven SAP” comprises a set of methods, BPM tools, and work templates that provide support from the strategy phase through process design and organizational design to implementation of the required SAP modules. According to IDS Scheer it enables SAP software to be rolled out up to 30 percent faster and 15 percent cheaper. The special focus is on aligning the ERP modules with the requirements of internal and inter-company process structures.

Summary

IDS Scheer like many BPMS vendors is looking at ways to differentiate its product set from its competition. The BPMS market is currently going though a series of announcements in which vendors are adding to their partnership approaches, particularly with Microsoft. IDS Scheer’ Microsoft announcement is slightly different as most of the other are around collaboration with the MOSS environment; here we have got a more seamless join between BizTalk and ARIS. I am particularly interested in the BMC Software announcement which is something at the moment that no one else is offering.

Governance is an important issue for many organisations and IDS Scheer’s announcement of a Governance Engine is a big help for many organisations, particularly for those with SAP, who can additionally benefit from the close relationship between the two parties.