Scaling to the global stage—with ARIS
            

Over the past decade, this US-based tech company has grown its membership base into the hundreds of millions, with users on nearly every corner of the planet. This success has meant it’s needed to scale fast—by opening new offices and kicking staff recruitment into overdrive.

A few years back, to support this growth while saving time and money, management decided to outsource key finance activities. Previously, tasks like processing invoices, making payments and onboarding new suppliers were completed in-house. Now they were entrusted to a third-party provider. Although the move was meant to ease the company’s growing pains, it created a whole new set of challenges.

In the existing environment, process visibility was muddled. Staff from the company and its new outsourcing partner lacked a common standard of process documentation—which led to confusion over roles and responsibilities and mounting delays in processing essential documents. Personnel spent unnecessary time troubleshooting and locating the relevant guidance on how to execute a process.

“It got to the point where our outsource partner created their own operating procedures because they wanted to organize information differently,” says a manager in the company’s Global Business Services unit. “We realized we needed a fix starting from the ground up—a full-scale business process transformation.”

Where full-scale process excellence is concerned, one solution stood out: ARIS Enterprise, the industry-leading business process analysis platform from Software AG.

Discovering the ARIS difference

For process management, the choice of ARIS Enterprise was linked to several factors: its modern look and feel, user-friendly interface and capabilities that can go toe-to-toe with any competitor. Although the company entertained solutions from other vendors, Software AG’s immediately stood out. ARIS Business Design & Strategy promised to deliver exactly what it needed: the ability to design, document and optimize business processes—and visualize them through mapping, dashboarding and charts which are all tied into a single source of information.

ARIS Rollout and Change Management enabled necessary stakeholders to be keyed into governing workflows, enhancing collaboration, and ensuring process updates would be read and understood by all. The platform’s ease of use was essential too: thanks to steps view, a simplified way of diagramming processes, ARIS can be made accessible to a wide range of personnel, including non-technical users.

“With ARIS, you don’t need an epic amount of technical knowledge to be able to read a process,” the manager says. “It makes digitizing desktop procedures incredibly simple.”

Embracing operational excellence

With a deal signed in early 2020, the company began a pilot implementation. Despite a global pandemic that shuttered offices for months, it went off safely, securely and delivered an immediate impact. Its first project with ARIS was a revamping of processes in Accounts Payable, the unit responsible for processing invoices and payments to suppliers. Over the course of 2020, with training and oversight from Software AG, its IT team designed, onboarded, and validated an initial 51 process models.

Users saw immediate improvements. Thanks to ARIS, Accounts Payable staff from both the company and its outsourcing partner were finally speaking the same language: with processes now thoroughly mapped and documented on a single platform, they were able to execute tasks with a new level of confidence and ease. Their mutual frustration became a thing of the past—and time spent on administrative tasks fell dramatically. The new centralized repository also enabled them to find and analyze information faster, and set the stage for a range of future process improvements. “ARIS provides us a single source of truth that we can build on to make our operations more efficient,” the manager says.

With its successful ARIS pilot complete, the company has embarked on a more systemic roll-out—starting by modeling an additional 100 procurement-related processes, with plans to scale up to the rest of finance. In the longer term, it also has its sights on process mining: a method of process analysis that will allow it to more thoroughly analyze its overall process landscape, eliminate bottlenecks, minimize redundancies and drive process improvements. According to Global Business Services leadership, the company will soon evaluate process mining solutions from different vendors. And its experience with Software AG means that ARIS Process Mining & Analysis—a best-in-class capability that’s part of the wider ARIS platform—will be at the top of the list.

“Software AG has gone the extra mile to ensure our adoption of ARIS has been a success,” the manager says. “With the best product on the market, our finance team and our outsourcing partner have a whole new degree of confidence in our ability to carry out processes accurately and with optimal efficiency.”