Has anyone done such imports from Visio into ARIS and would like to share their experience?
The first attempt ended with several dialogue boxes and information boxes but the import was not successful. Any field reports are welcome. Thank you
Best Reply
This approach does not work well, IMHO. The main reason is that your stakeholders could create the source Visio models using different Visio versions / pallets / elements, etc. As a result, you get a very low-quality model in ARIS where you need to spend a lot of time for alignments. I'll give an example. When a user draws in Visio a non-defined connection in your import scheme, ARIS will draw it... as a line! And sometimes, it is a pure hell to find out what is wrong with the imported diagram. Problem #2 - is that you have to manually replace your imported lanes, which is also a very serious batch of work. Problem #3 - different descriptions, step codes, etc., which you get in ARIS as plain text, not as object attributes.
So, we found out that it is much more efficient to do it manually. The time you need to polish the imported diagram (alignment, resizing, adding lanes, filling attributes, and not forgetting you need to set up an import scheme) is much more, and the quality much less, than you'd do it manually. My strategy in this field is straightforward: we give this job to juniors who understand BPMN + ARIS. As a result, it is quicker and cheaper. And the quality is much higher because when you convert it manually, you also fix some semantic/rule issues. By my statistics, it takes 1 w/d to convert 5-15 diagrams (depending on size). An average company has about 300-500 processes initially, so 2-3 juns could convert it (and integrate with organization, systems etc.) in 10-15 days, and that is a very good pace.
It is a gift, of course, when a client has the source in something BPMN-compatible, e.g., Bizagi, Camunda, etc., but unfortunately, we mainly face Visio sources, and it is mainly about a manual job.
2 Replies
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Best reply
This approach does not work well, IMHO. The main reason is that your stakeholders could create the source Visio models using different Visio versions / pallets / elements, etc. As a result, you get a very low-quality model in ARIS where you need to spend a lot of time for alignments. I'll give an example. When a user draws in Visio a non-defined connection in your import scheme, ARIS will draw it... as a line! And sometimes, it is a pure hell to find out what is wrong with the imported diagram. Problem #2 - is that you have to manually replace your imported lanes, which is also a very serious batch of work. Problem #3 - different descriptions, step codes, etc., which you get in ARIS as plain text, not as object attributes.
So, we found out that it is much more efficient to do it manually. The time you need to polish the imported diagram (alignment, resizing, adding lanes, filling attributes, and not forgetting you need to set up an import scheme) is much more, and the quality much less, than you'd do it manually. My strategy in this field is straightforward: we give this job to juniors who understand BPMN + ARIS. As a result, it is quicker and cheaper. And the quality is much higher because when you convert it manually, you also fix some semantic/rule issues. By my statistics, it takes 1 w/d to convert 5-15 diagrams (depending on size). An average company has about 300-500 processes initially, so 2-3 juns could convert it (and integrate with organization, systems etc.) in 10-15 days, and that is a very good pace.
It is a gift, of course, when a client has the source in something BPMN-compatible, e.g., Bizagi, Camunda, etc., but unfortunately, we mainly face Visio sources, and it is mainly about a manual job.
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Hi Olaf,
I agree with Alexander the import functionality is not reliable. But this is mainly because Visio is most often used as a kind of free-style drawing tool.
However, I found a work-around pretty useful: You can export the symbols and their names of your Visio file (precondition: the right symbols were used in Visio). This export gives you an excel file with a tab for each symbol type. This excel file can then be used to "import objects" in ARIS. Then, you basically only have to put all objects into the right order in ARIS; but, depending on the size of the model and how fast you are in Visio/ARIS the break-even of the time spent for the two approaches is different.
Best,
Veronika