Storing and managing documents in ARIS

Do you still store a lot of your company information in traditional documents? Do you keep these documents on (departmental) network drives or locally on your PC? Would you like to put this information and knowledge in context with other assets and your business processes? If you answered “yes” to at least one of these questions, you should take a look at ARIS. With ARIS, you can create an Enterprise Management System that eliminates informational silos and assures the right people have the right information in the right place, at the right time. ARIS integrates with Microsoft^® SharePoint^® to close the gaps between process and document management.

Create a single source of truth for your daily work

With an Enterprise Management System powered by ARIS, you can establish a single source of truth for your business that describes how it is supposed to work. A major part of this single source of truth is based on information models designed with ARIS—e.g., business process maps. But not everything is kept within a business process model. On a lower level, documents typically describe how business is supposed to work on a specific level: operating procedures or policies are good examples. These documents can be linked and made available to consumers using the document storing and managing capabilities of ARIS.

This documents fact sheet shows all documents related to the process opened.

Fast and easy access, anytime

Every ARIS user can gain quick and effective access to all relevant and the most recent documentation available in the documents storage section of ARIS. It is a storage facility for your documents, and it comes embedded in every ARIS installation. This capability is suitable for a volume of up to 40,000 documents. If you need more, you can add the ARIS Extensions for Premium Document Management or SharePoint Integration.

Key benefits

• Store any business-related (critical) documents and their versions in one central space
• Gain direct and context-sensitive access to relevant documentation
• Improve content as a team and notify affected parties via social collaboration and pre-deployed workflow capabilities in ARIS
• Quickly retrieve documents via tags and references to other ARIS content
• Control data security, validity and privacy via central administration
• Lower TCO by providing an integrated standard document storage in ARIS

Choose from three options

Depending on your requirements like the number of documents you would like to store, you can either use the ARIS Document Management capability, the ARIS Extension for Premium Document Storage or the ARIS Extension for SharePoint Integration.

ARIS Document Management The ARIS Document Management capability is available for every user of the ARIS Enterprise edition. No add-on or 3^rd party software is necessary. This option is suitable for use cases with up to 40,000 documents. Just link the document to the representation object of an ARIS model and publish it. Users can then access the latest version of this document via the link if they have access to the object it is linked to.

Premium Document Storage This option is suitable for use cases with more than 40,000 and up to 1 million documents. The solution technically works like the standard ARIS Document Management, but you will need to add the ARIS Extension for Premium Document Storage to handle higher numbers of documents.

SharePoint Integration The third option is suitable for you if you want to store your documents in SharePoint and works for high numbers of documents. You will need to add the ARIS Extension for SharePoint Integration. Documents are also linked and published via representation objects in ARIS, but in addition SharePoint specifications and user permissions are applicable.

We were constantly reworking our processes and there was little control or guidance. With ARIS we now have complete visibility and control of processes worldwide.”

– Tesco Global

Key features

• Link and search process-relevant documents
• Upload, download and delete documents
• Full text search or browse for uploaded documents
• Access every important document from ARIS
• Manage versions and revisions of documents
• Define additional metadata fields
• Define tags and use them for collaboration or to ease your search on a subject
• Set up folder structures and manage access
  

Define metadata during the upload.

Business Process Management with ARIS catapulted us into the big leagues with regard to process optimization.”

– Markus Lohrmann, Corporate Lead, BPM, Miltenyi Biotec B.V. & Co. KG

Add documents to governance workflows

Upload, attach and relate documents to give more detail for governance workflows, such as improvement proposals and change requests. Adding documents to governance workflows will automatically hand them over from process step to process step and add to the final decision quality.

Segregate duties and rely on embedded document approval

To ensure a document’s validity before public availability, ready-to-use approval workflows are available in ARIS for approval of every document version. In addition, ARIS allows for segregation of duties, where process owners can separately decide whether or not an updated document version is applicable to be shown in context with their (process) content or not. Thus, documents can have a lifecycle of their own and will not be shown in particular processes to other users, unless approved by all parties.

See all documents which are related to the model or objects occurring in this specific model.

Not only do we now have a clear picture of our internal processes, but we can also share them directly with business stakeholders or even regulatory agencies. Transparency. Efficiency. Better customer experience. These are just three benefits of working with ARIS.”

– Sekerbank