Hi,
I was hoping to ask any experienced ARIS users in this online community to help my team build an entry model for our ARIS flows. I currently work at Johnson & Johnson, and our group supports all global supply chain functions in the consumer sector. If anyone has ideas on how to graphically represent this, please contact me at arajan1@its.jnj.com.
Thank you!
Anjana Rajan
Hello Anjana,
What do you consider as an entry model? As far as I understand you want to map your current business processes in an EPC (event-driven process chain) model, is that right?
If yes, you can do that with the free ARIS software called "ARIS Express".
Please go to this page for the download and further information:
The best advice I can give you on creating entry pages is to talke to the audience that will be using it. The entry page is a navagation mechanism designed to allow people with little or no knowledge of the content to drill down and find things they are interested in. I also would recommend that you take a look at the Structuring Model in ARIS and make use of it to create your entry pages. The advantage here is that the Structuring Element is allowed to be assigned any ARIS model type which allows you flexibility for the future to drill into new model types as you add them to your method.
Having said all of that up front, I generally have seen 2 types of entry page. One is process centric where all of the end-2-end processes (usually Value Chains) are grouped into categories. In many cases the high level categories are based on something that the business is familiar with (SCOR, Porter, Hammer, etc. all have high level categories of process).
The second approach is based on the domain of Enterprise Architecture. The entry page would then show the various domains of EA which your are modeling (Business, Data, Applications etc.) and each of those would have their own entry page at the next level down. The composition of each of the lower level entry pages is again specific to each audience.
A few more points. There is no restriction to have only one entry page per area. Applications for instance might have one entry page grouping them by the type of technology used (for IT) and another grouping them by which business process they support (for business folks). Entry pages can be made to look any way you like by importing graphics and dropping ARIS objects on top of them. One caution here, graphics take up a lot of space in your database and will increase your publishing time.