Business Process Modeling in the ARIS Environment

The ARIS methodology was developed by IDS Scheer AG, Germany. Currently, the ARIS software of the same name is presented on the market of business process modeling tools, which includes several modules.
The development of the ARIS methodology pursued the following objectives:

• Solving the problems of dividing functional units
• Clear delineation of responsibility and authority
• Understanding the organization's business processes
• Creating process descriptions - standards of activity of organizations
• Providing a framework for analyzing and optimizing business processes
• Optimization of the organizational structure of the enterprise
• Operational Risk Management
• Knowledge transfer and effective staff training

The existing standards and specifications for the description of processes and data, such as IDEF3, ERD, DFD, UML, etc., were integrated into the ARIS methodology.

An approach to describing processes based on the ARIS methodology assumes consideration of the organization’s activities from four points of view: organizational structure, data (flows and structure), functions (functional hierarchies), control and management (summary business process models describing inputs and outputs).
The ARIS methodology includes a large number of different notations that allow the creation of various flexible models of organization. The most significant and practically used ARIS notations are:

• notation of the Value-added Chain Diagram (diagram of the chain of the process that adds value);
• extended event-driven process chain notations — eEPC (extended event-driven process chain notation) and PCD (process chain diagram);
• Organizational Chart notation;
• Function Tree notation;
• Product Tree notation.

The advantage of the ARIS methodology (from a formal point of view) lies in its complexity, which is manifested in the interrelation of models built in different notations. The ARIS methodology allows us to describe the activities of an organization from different points of view, while the resulting models will be to some extent related.

In this case, the main models used in the ARIS environment are:

• Description of the organizational structure;
• Description of the risk structure;
• Description of the objectives of the enterprise;
• Description of all processes occurring in the organization.