3rd June 2024
Are you looking for an alternative to Tibco Nimbus? As a well-established business process management tool Nimbus has been around for over two decades and used by businesses globally. While it is an accomplished tool many users have found it costly and cumbersome to implement and maintain.
Liberty Spark is a central process library, process management and process improvement solution. Based on the same principles of end user engagement and creating a simple common language for your business Spark makes an ideal alternative to Tibco Nimbus.
Tibco Nimbus is an enterprise process documentation and management software. First released in 1997, it was targeted at Quality Managers and grew to be used across many different sectors as a Business Process Management (BPM) platform. What set Tibco Nimbus platform apart from most other process tools in the early 2000s was its focus on making process understandable across all areas of a business. It’s popular as it is less technical than most process improvement and management platforms.
Like Spark, Tibco Nimbus is based on the Universal Process Notation, or UPN, approach for documenting business processes.
As an alternative to Tibco Nimbus, Spark has several key similarities as well as some significant improvements. The founding team at Spark worked with the Nimbus platform for many years and have considerable experience using it for process improvement, change and transformation.
It was this experience that led the team to build Spark. Spark takes the things that make Tibco Nimbus great but makes it even easier to use. If you’re looking for something intuitive, easy to learn and provides more insights and analytics – Liberty Spark could well be a perfect fit.
If you’re already using Tibco Nimbus, Spark can import your Tibco Nimbus processes to make transitioning even easier.
Both products share a common approach to process mapping known as UPN, or Universal Process Notation.
Mapping processes with UPN is designed to be very simple. Instead of a complex palette of shapes and symbols, as used by notations such as BPMN, it’s based on a set of simple questions. What happens, who does it, when does it happen, why does it happen and how is it done?
Spark has simplified this technique further, while maintaining maximum flexibility. Spark uses a ‘What and Why Box’, with the key questions embedded. This makes it even easier for a team to capture processes.
The user interface has built in shortcuts so that each box can be added anywhere on the screen with the click of a button. This combination makes Spark a powerful workshop facilitation tool by removing the software as a barrier to process mapping. Workshop facilitators can now ‘map at the speed of conversation’.
Another similarity is in hierarchical modelling. While not unique to these tools they have both been specifically designed to make this as easy as possible. Process steps are deconstructed at the click of a button. The user is able to zoom in and out of the process model from a high level down to the smallest detail.
Spark has been built to make business transformation and process improvement easier and faster. Not only is the process modelling simplified but Spark also has built in analytical dashboards providing users with instant insights. Example dashboards include process costing, business case building, Lean and responsibility analysis, among others.
In addition to these analytical capabilities, Spark also includes features that help drive user engagement and adoption of processes. This includes things like the Process Improvement initiative manager and the Process Health tracker to ensure that everyone is participating in continuous improvement.
“If you are already using Tibco Nimbus and considering changing to something else, Liberty Spark is definitely an option. Spark is perfect if you want to get started quickly and want to create a more agile and innovative approach to process improvement and engage more people across the business.”
Craig Willis
Head of Process Improvement Solutions, Netcall
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