Using Visio for Business Process Modelling (BPM)

[Brent Husband]

Our organization is currently using Visio 2003 Standard SP2.

Some of our users are pushing to replace Visio with iGrafx
(http://www.igrafx.com/index.html) for the purpose of business process
modelling (BPM). The contention is that Visio is an inferior tool when it
comes to BPM.

I have looked for comparisions of the BPM capabilities of Visio and iGrafx,
but so far no luck.

Does anyone have suggestions or first hand knowledge ?

I am checking to see if the BPM capabilities are being improved in version
12 of Visio.

 

[Al Edlund]

you might check out the new blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_rockey
al

 

[Brent Husband]

Al,

I neglected to clarify that I have already looked at the new blog at
http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_rockey.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Brent Husband

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

I can provide a little information about using Visio for BPM. Visio offers
both ad-hoc and structured forms of modeling business processes.

Visio 2003 offers a Business Process category complete with Audit Diagrams,
Cause and Effect, Cross Functional, Event-driven Process Chain, Fault Tree
Analysis and TQM. Several of these drawing types are suitable for Six Sigma
processes. On the web Visio offers a BPMN template for download.

For more sophisticated BPM solutions, Visio becomes a component in
Microsoft's Business Process Management strategy. You can read a whitepaper
on the Microsoft solution "stack" here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/biztalk/biztalk2004/planning/bpm-solution-overview.mspx

I am fairly sure that neither Visio nor iGrafx is a superset of the other.
Therefore, you will have to take a closer look at your needs and how each
tool addresses them.

We're not ready to announce specifics around Visio 12 beyond what is
included in the blog, so please check back there for Visio 12 developments.

--
Mark Nelson
Office Graphics - Visio
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.