Enabling organizations to keep up with the pace, volume and complexity of change: Signavio

Signavio was born out of an obvious need for a more collaborative and accessible approach to process management. Four students at the Hasso-Plattner Institute near Berlin, Germany, saw that process management was either non-existent or completely unmanageable for many companies - there simply was no effective way to share knowledge between employees or departments. The students wanted to address this issue, and what started out as a university research project to create a modelling tool with collaborative functions turned into a prototype for the Signavio software that first appeared in 2006. After the tool was refined, Signavio was founded in 2009 and introduced the first completely web-based collaborative BPM software.

The name of the company comes from an Italian word “Segnavia,” meaning signpost. Signavio was created to serve as a signpost for workflows, processes, and decisions. Signavio Business Transformation Suite, a cloud-based software for collaborative process and decision management, gives organizations of all sizes a way to orient themselves in times of constant change.

The cloud-based collaborative approach to BPM was based on the premise that harnessing the wisdom of the crowd and tapping into the knowledge of your team could unlock untold benefits. Today, many companies are facing challenges from constant change - both internally and within the markets they operate. Navigating this change means transforming how they do business, and Signavio supports them with the complex job of actually identifying opportunities, and executing on strategy. Headquartered in Berlin with offices in the US, Singapore and beyond, Signavio serves customers around the globe across all industries.

We caught up with Dr. Gero Decker, Co-founder and CEO of Signavio

Given the great initial success of the Signavio Process Manager, where is the Suite these days?

Good question, we’ve come a long way since 2009. We’ve grown our product portfolio to four modular products, each focused on a different aspect of business transformation. These are Signavio Process Manager, which combines business and decision management, Signavio Workflow Accelerator for workflow automation, and Signavio Process Intelligence which is a BI solution. These all cluster around the Collaboration Hub, which is designed to be a central digital meeting place for discussion and collaboration. We call it the Business Transformation Suite, the combination of all these powerful elements in one tool.

Our mission is “BPM for Everyone”, and the current iterations of our products reflect this, by keeping the overriding themes of our products in mind at all times - collaboration, transparency, leveraging the wisdom of the crowd. Creating top-of-the-line products from a technical perspective is important, but supporting the ‘soft’ side of an organization is equally so - engagement, collaboration, teamwork - elements which must be nurtured for an organization to succeed in initiatives from day-to-day operations to a full business transformation program.

Can you talk about any new products or services that were launched?

Yes. In September, we released a brand new feature for Signavio Process Manager - Customer Journey Mapping! CJMs are an essential part of empathizing with customers and identifying ways to delight them, and to provide visibility into the journey they take as they interact with an organization. Our new feature will make sharing and collaborating on CJMs much easier, as well as directly connecting the insights to the processes to which they relate. We are really excited to release this, and already have a lot of great feedback.

To what do you contribute your success in terms of product and consistent company growth?

When it comes to our product, ours was and remains an innovative software solution that broke an outdated mold in terms of making BPM, operational excellence, and the readiness to transform on demand, company-wide endeavors. Our collaborative features, ease-of-use, intuitive interface and cloud-based application are what keep us at the top of our field, and what helped us to expand from a small ambitious start-up to a global player. It’s the team that keeps us growing. The Signavio teams work together to develop products our customers love using, and to ensure that customers remain satisfied. This brings together all departments and requires not only close internal collaboration but also intimate customer relationships.

Signavio transcends what it means to purely exist as a company. Our team brings expertise from all over the world and from a plethora of disciplines ensuring this remains a hub of shared knowledge and mutual learning. We currently boast over 200 employees based all over Europe, with locations also in California, Boston, Singapore and Australia. Ultimately our aim is to create products that evoke delight in our customers and that realize our founding mission, making BPM a collaborative endeavour and harnessing the wisdom of all stakeholders.

With over 1 million people using our software every day to transform their organizations, our mission has been remarkable and resounding in its success. We’ve been able to guide over 1000 companies in their transformation efforts, and are gaining momentum rapidly.

Client Manifestoes

“The Signavio Process Editor offers possibilities we simply wouldn’t have with other tools. By deploying the process platform we expect enormous synergy effects at AOK Brandenburg. As we have already made excellent experience in previous projects, the Signavio team is the first choice for us.” - Dr. Anke-Britt Möhr, AOK Nordost.

“The impact was immediate and measurable. We’ve seen a significant reduction in development time for API definition and construction. The efficiency gain is likely greater than 50%.” - Harrison Lync, Consensus Corporation.

As co-founder and CEO, Dr. Gero Decker is responsible for Signavio’s overall strategic direction. He is a business process management expert and passionate about product innovation. Before creating Signavio, he worked for Volkswagen, SAP and McKinsey. Gero holds a PhD in Business Process Management from Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

“Our Business Transformation Suite is the smarter way to continuously translate between strategy and execution.”

keep in touch: www.signavio.com