NK
Hello Community,
My question is that I have a large number of processes in Excel spreadsheet. Is there a way I can import those into ARIS as BPMN Process Diagrams? If this is a possibility, then is there a format that the processes need to be in? Also, can designers do that or only architects could?
Please note we only have Connect v15 and cannot download or run the Client.
Hoping to receive some insights pls.
Thanks in advance.
Hello Neha,
the central questions are:
- how many processes are there?
- do your Spreadsheets contain all the information you need for generating a BPMN diagram?
E. g. do you want to create lanes for roles and place tasks in them? Do you need to import the roles as well or are they already in your database? Do you want to create Pools for collaboration diagrams? How do your spreadsheets represent Gateways and possibly Gateway conditions? Are events represented in the spreadsheet? How are message flows between pools represented in the spreadsheets?
Is there any other information in your Spreadsheet that you want to see in your BPMN model - like annotations or data objects as input/output?
As you can see there is a lot of information in a BPMN process that might be represented in your spreadsheets in some way, but there is no way of anticipating for a script developer how this might have been realized in your spreadsheets. And I'm sure spreadsheets of another new ARIS user would have found a different solution how to represent something similar. So whichever way you look at it, you need to develop a script suiting your conventions for representing the BPMN output and Spreadsheet input.
Then reconsider how many processes you are really talking about. There is a chance that layouting them by hand is quicker than developing a script. This would also be a chance to review the processes as they become clearer with the modelling notation. Suppose there were a convention how to represent BPMN diagrams in spreadsheets ready to import, it would probably take longer to transform your spreadsheets according to the conventions than modelling them straight away.
If you have good documentation in your Spreadsheet processes it may be worth importing the roles and task objects as flat lists, so you do not have to re-type task descriptions and other details. All you need to do is creating occurrences of those imported objects in your BPMN diagrams.
