EDHEC: 
            

Founded in 1906, EDHEC is a leading international business school with five campuses in Lille, Nice, London, Paris, and Singapore. It specializes in business, entrepreneurship, management, and innovation. The school’s teaching philosophy, inspired by its award-winning research activities, focuses on “learning by doing.”

Reducing complexity for both students and faculty

When Mohamed-Hédi Charki, Professor of Information Systems at EDHEC, started including Business Process Management tools in his Management Information Systems curriculum for 2017, it was a very complex undertaking. What started out as a good intention—to teach students about as many BPM tools as possible—turned out to be a challenging task. A large selection of process management tools were overwhelming to students, and they varied widely in terms of quality and access. This resulted in students failing to learn any specific one tool in-depth. Grading work was frustrating as many students had even tried to combine several different tools to analyze the same one process. So, when Professor Mohamed-Hédi saw that ARIS offered the University Relations Program—an industry leading tool, with free licenses and teaching materials included—he jumped at the chance.

A full-service educational package

After reaching out to Software AG’s University Relations Program, EDHEC quickly decided to move forward with the project, and began setting up ARIS for students and faculty. Technical stumbling blocks were easily solved: At the beginning of the project, for example, it became clear that a heterogenous population of users (750+ students and 5 faculties)—all with their own specific IT requirements—meant that a private cloud solution wouldn’t work. Software AG responded by producing individual access vouchers, ensuring that the course could start as planned.

As Professor Mohamed-Hédi explains, “I said, ‘hey I have a large number of students so how can we do this?’ and the University Relations team at Software AG was able to come up with a solution that worked perfectly. That really impressed me.”

Educational excellence in the cl(oud)ssroom

Now, with the ARIS cloud application, the faculty can do live software demonstrations in the classroom, and students can easily work together.

“This year is the first time we’re using ARIS as a single unique software for teaching BPA. My job as a course coordinator managing 16 cohorts and four additional colleagues was made so much easier. The package includes academic materials and teaching notes, and very reactive support that solved minor tech issues immediately. This enabled us to offer a comprehensive ARIS process management course for the first time—and it made it easier to teach.”

ARIS has revolutionized the classroom at EDHEC. As part of their coursework for Management Information Systems that is one fundamental course in the Business Management track of the EDHEC Master in Management program, students complete a business case study project, analyzing the case of a real company that had struggles with operational and financial problems and customer dissatisfaction. Using ARIS in the cloud, which can be taught in real-time in the classroom, the students apply the different functions of process analysis functions to the case study. Each team of students focuses on visualizing, analyzing, and optimizing processes using ARIS, all the while learning tips and techniques for using the tool.

“ARIS’s features are easy to use and access—and because it’s all in the cloud, students don’t always need to meet in person to work together. That makes teamwork easy.” – Professor Mohamed-Hédi

In total, the project has seen over 1000 downloads, subscriptions and other activities by faculty and students. ARIS has enabled comprehensive business process management education and provided a tool for effective, practical, multimedia learning. EDHEC plans to repeat the highly successful project with next year’s cohort, and Professor Mohamed-Hédi can envision ARIS becoming a cornerstone of his courses for years to come—possibly tapping into the AI-driven capabilities of process mining next. And most importantly, students emerging from his program are prepared to enter the business world as BPM experts familiar with the most powerful process management tool out there.