IBM® offers a BPM modeling platform for the cloud: IBM® Blueworks™ Live, formerly named Lombardi Blueprint®. This new platform empowers process owners and business analysts to document business processes, collaborate, share information and drive business process analysis (BPA) for process improvements in their organization. The IBM® Blueworks Live™ tool supports BPMN™ 2.0 for modeling and can also import Microsoft® Office Visio® diagrams. However, BlueWorks Live™ is not designed to export process models back to Visio®.

The Oracle Business Process Analysis (BPA) Suite comprises Oracle Corporation software products that provide modeling and analysis of business processes based on the ARIS tool suite.  The BPA tool suite is used by business analysts and technical architects for modeling of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and implementation using the Oracle Fusion Middleware. The models from BPA suite can be converted to other tools such as Microsoft Visio or published to SharePoint.

Microsoft Visio® is a very commonly used tool for the mapping of business processes. Many BPM modeling tools claim to have Visio import abilities, but the real functionality they offer is no more than a “tick the box” for answering a RFQ (request for a quotation). This seems to be designed more as a way to gain a foothold for submitting and winning  sales proposals rather than offering the really needed functionality of importing quality Visio diagrams.

Zephyr® is a leading test management software available as Zephyr® Enterprise Edition and as add-on for JIRA® on-premise or JIRA® cloud solutions. With Zephyr® on JIRA Cloud companies can create, plan, and execute tests right inside of their JIRA® cloud instance. The BPM-X® team has developed an integration link for a project between BPM modeling tools such as ARIS®, CaseWise, SPARX Enterprise Architect, Microsoft Visio® and many others to generate test-cases and scripts right out of the business process models and diagrams and to instantly load them into Zephyr® on JIRA®.

Enterprise management tool vendors in the enterprise architecture (EA), business process analysis (BPA) or application lifecycle management (ALM) domains offer built-in integrations for standard formats such as XPDL or Microsoft® Visio®. The reason for these features is that vendors are compelled to have “tick-the-box” integration capabilities in order to smoothly align their offerings with schematic requests for information (RFI) or quotation (RFQ) from prospects.

Our sales team receives a lot of inquiries to generate test-cases from existing business process models for model-based testing using tools like Excel®, JIRA® or HP ALM for test management. Besides Visio®, Enterprise Architect® and ARIS®, new configurations for IBM® Rational® System Architect, CaseWise Corporate Modeler® and others like OpenText® ProVision are on the way to expand the trial offering.

Modeling assets are developed in many different scenarios, e.g. in total quality management, during ERP application blueprinting, in enterprise architecture initiatives or in business process improvement projects. Although there are different motivations and appropriate methodologies in modeling the Enterprise, it would be beneficial to leverage existing investments or streamline the overall approach of modeling in an organization.