August Scheer and the ARIS architecture: how one notation became a standard of German engineering
The story of the EPC notation and the ARIS platform, which won 8,000 enterprise customers worldwide and became synonymous with BPM in German-speaking countries.
In the early 1990s Professor August-Wilhelm Scheer of Saarbrücken University was solving a problem that faced all of German industry at the time: how to describe the complex integrated processes of large enterprises so that everyone involved — from the worker on the assembly line to the IT architect — could understand them.
The result was the ARIS (Architecture of Integrated Information Systems) framework and the EPC (Event-driven Process Chain) notation, which over a decade turned Germany into a world center of BPM practice.
The context of the era
The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time of explosive growth in enterprise information systems. SAP R/3, released in 1992, required a careful description of business processes before implementation. The notations that existed then — IDEF, data flow diagrams, flowcharts — did not meet the needs of complex enterprise rollouts.
Scheer proposed a radically new approach: viewing an enterprise through five interconnected views — organizational, functional, data, control and product. This became the famous “ARIS House”, where the control view, through the EPC notation, ties all the others together.
The genius of EPC
EPC is built on a remarkably simple idea: a process is an alternation of events and functions. An event is a passive fact (“application received”, “payment received”), a function an active action (“check the documents”, “dispatch the shipment”). Between them sit the logical connectors AND, OR, XOR.
This simplicity proved powerful. Business users understood the diagrams without training. Analysts could quickly build detailed models. Programmers could use them as the basis for configuring SAP.
The heyday of ARIS
By the mid-1990s IDS Scheer AG, founded by Scheer, had become one of the largest players in the global enterprise-software market. By 2000 the ARIS platform was used by more than 8,000 organizations — from Mercedes-Benz and Lufthansa to the German government.
ARIS took an especially strong position in SAP R/3 implementation projects. Scheer agreed with SAP on integration: ARIS models could be loaded directly into SAP to configure the system. This made the ARIS + SAP pairing the de facto standard for the German enterprise market.
Decline and transformation
In the late 2000s the company behind ARIS became part of a large European software vendor. By then the world was already moving toward BPMN. Graphical tools for BPMN were multiplying, and open BPM engines were gaining popularity.
ARIS did not disappear — it remains one of the leading enterprise BPM tools. But its dominance of the 1990s and 2000s is in the past. New projects more often choose the BPMN stack as more open and less tied to a single vendor.
The legacy
Despite a relative decline in popularity, Scheer’s and ARIS’s influence on the BPM discipline remains fundamental. The concept of describing an enterprise through integrated views is his idea. The concept of a process as an alternation of events and functions is his idea. Many BPMN constructs are reimagined EPC ideas.
In German-language BPM literature Scheer is still cited as one of the main classics — alongside Deming, Hammer and Porter.