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 in Potsdam, Germany saw that process management was either non existent or completely unmanageable for many companies—there was no way to share knowledge between employees or departments. And while there might be theoretical or academic ways to study and implement process management, businesses weren’t benefitting from it because it didn’t exist in any sort of accessible platform, such as a software solution. The students wanted to address this issue and what started out as a research project to create a modeling tool with collaborative functions turned into a prototype for the Signavio software that appeared in 2006. After the tool was refined, Signavio was founded in 2009 and introduced the first completely web-based collaborative BPM software.