Likelihood to Recommend Well suited scenarios include IT portfolio management, project portfolio management, enterprise architecture planning, modeling of business capabilities, using standard frameworks that ship out of the box such as TOGAF, and integration with SharePoint. Less appropriate scenarios would be detailed data modeling and using the tool expecting to get model drive code execution.
Read full review SAP PowerDesigner allows our team of data modelers to work and collaborate from a single repository and single data dictionary. This helps enforce consistency as data elements are referenced in other objects. Prior to our use of PD, we might have an element named "ppt" in one table, "participant" in another table and "part" in a third table. By forcing everything to be used from the data dictionary, we avoid these situations because everyone has to go to the dictionary. And we are able to easily do peer reviews on models before they are released because we are collaborating through the use of the repository.
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Pros Modelling the Enterprise through the creation of catalogues and matrices of Enterprise information Creation of views to supports strategy execution and decision making Central storage of Enterprise information Management of a agreed meta model Read full review Impact Analysis The domain structure helps you to handle different data types to unify. Moving between from conceptual model to logical model and from logical model to physical model is so easy. It also excels at implementation of database vendor-specific physical options. The repository structure helps you to use in multi developer and architect based organizations by the check in and check out mechanism. It also has a fully configurable naming convention implementation. Coloring is simple with format copying and pasting option. Read full review Cons More standard connectors for integration with other modeling tools could be beneficial for companies having legacy tools/fragmented toolsets. Better automated diagramming features would be useful. Read full review It took some time to figure out how to leverage the power of the repository. Some better examples in the documentation would have been helpful. Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Support Rating Highly knowledgable team and fast response times
Read full review We did have to reach out to support to learn how to properly utilize the repository feature and share the data model across many developers. Support was able to help us get this set up correctly. The downside was it took us several weeks before we gave up and contacted support. We should have done that earlier. I would say, however, the documentation wasn't clear on how to do this. So support was a great big help!
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Alternatives Considered - Microsoft tools are manual and data is not centralized
-
ARIS is not as flexible as Avolution
- LeanIX is close, but lacks business content/accelerators that Avolution provides
- LeanIX is in the cloud and multi-user
Read full review Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler : Unfortunately this tool only supports Oracle Databases as a target database, but has many features similar to SAP Sybase PowerDesigner.
erwin Data Modeler : Has some issues when switching from Conceptual Model to Physical Model, Impact Analysis, and formatting copy and pasting.
Vertabelo: Only supports online models and from a governance perspective, it is impossible for me to connect my target database with an online application because of company policy and regulation requirements.
Read full review Return on Investment Positive - time to value for EA activities Positive - robust decision making Read full review Standardization of models Impact Analysis Graphical User Interface Ease of deployment Read full review ScreenShots