IBM BPM Reviews

BPM is very horizontal solution, so it can be used across any kind of industry. Financial services is the largest one - banking and insurance would be the biggest sector for BPM. But really, it's anything where there's a situation where a request comes in the door and has to be serviced, or at least that use case fits most of the time. But my biggest project at the moment is telecom infrastructure for mobile phone tower installation of antennas.

In terms of how our clients use it for workflow, first of all they're just going to implement what the process is. It's very similar to any kind of BPR methodology, mapping out the process - the "as-is" process - and then using that process to identify what the "to-be" process should be, how it should be different. Sometimes, it's even just implementing things using automation with their "as-is," having automation so that they can actually analyze how it performs, and then using that to make decisions on how it should be improved. Then, in an iterative fashion, going ahead and making those improvements.

For our clients, I'd say the more common case of using it in conjunction with other IBM automation products would be the ECM, the content management, because a lot of business processes will be delayed with documents. So sometimes they will use the one that comes with BPM itself, but for customers that really want to focus on the documents, they will have IBM FileNet, the document management system for that, and that's usually fairly tightly compatible with BPM.

The most valuable thing is actually the Analytics, which is actually a little bit not where it should be.

I'm hearing things might be improving, to really deliver on BPM as opposed to simply workflow. That really should be emphasized a lot more than it has been, because a lot of customers will simply implement the process and leave it there, because the product maybe doesn't emphasize BPM as much as it should, as much as maybe they talk about it in the sales process.

The whole idea of BPM, is to iteratively improve the process, and in order to do that you have to have the Analytics tool with it. A lot of times that doesn't go as far as it should simply because there's a lot more work to be done for that to happen, and just some sort of technical limitations that don't make that as easy as it should be.

I think they are working on it. I'm looking forward to seeing how much of an improvement it will be. They did announce that they have some stuff on the way for this, so I'm hoping it will be good. I think that at the moment, BPM as an industry in general, and IBM in particular, is not differentiating itself enough. I think the hype for it is down a bit, and I think that is a key way that they can reinvigorate the whole thing, by going back to emphasizing the entire cycle and fitting in with business improvement, as opposed to just being a technology with a layer type of thing.

So, that is, in a way, the most important aspect of it, for it to be BPM, as opposed to simply another way to implement a software solution that could be the same as anything else.

I would say it's very good but it's not perfect. It is much more scalable than it has been in the past but there are some things, it does require some work to keep it stable. So that is an area that should be improved, actually.

The engine itself tends to accumulate a lot of data that needs to be cleaned up, and that's the kind of thing that keeps it from, in some scenarios, scaling as much as it needs to. And then, when you're building solutions, if you're not careful to keep the screens from being associated with too much data, if you're going to just do things the way that a lot of people would just assume that they can do, without having experience of having made those mistakes before, it will accumulate a lot of data, and that will cause it to perform very badly.

It would be great if you didn't have to worry about that, but the reality is, at the moment, that you have to pay attention to that. If you do, then you can do just fine. But if you pay attention only to the business requirements, and just throw in everything that the business imagines that it wants see, you can easily build something that is way too heavy on the front end. But if you handle those things, if you tune the underlying platform, it can achieve the target, sometimes with more hardware than you want.

In terms of ROI and scaling use of the product, I don't have a client where I can say that we specifically measured that as much as you would say we should, but my feeling is yes, they do see return on investment.

Usually it's the client is using their account. The initial technical support is fine. When there are escalations, and their Tiger Team comes in, they are excellent.

My clients that go with IBM usually do so because they have a sense of, if they have problems they have an organization like IBM to complain to.

If we try to use open-source, that's usually a problem if it's a relatively big company, something like banking or insurance, they're not going to want that. But the manufacturing companies, they tend not to care as much, and as long as it works they're fine. For banking, they want something that looks a bit like the big-time.

It has improved a lot. They built some tooling for the BPM platform in particular, in the releases that started about three years ago; they streamlined that quite a bit, it is quite a bit better.

It is still a massive installer compared to some of the heritage software that it was built from. It's quite large and it can take quite a bit of time to install. So that definitely could be better, but it is what it is, it's an IBM product.

Regarding working directly with IBM in the setup, if it's not an IBM project, usually I don't, because I'd have to pay. If it's actually an IBM customer then I would. And I do, sometimes, informally talk to some of the people that I know about what is the current latest and greatest way to handle certain things, but not so much in formal channels if it's not an IBM-direct engagement.

In the BPM space, the undisputed leader is a company called Pega. In terms of the market share, they win a lot more deals, but they have a very different approach, and they have different types of customers.

In the region where I work, Oracle is doing pretty well, although their software is not as good by any stretch. Their services organization is a bit more respected for some reason in the region. So they have won some things, although they struggle to actually deliver.

Globally, I think the other one that I find interesting is called Appian, and Appian does quite well. I think that they have more of a lightweight cloud solution that's a bit easier to go to. They have a strange sort of closed mindset, you can't read their documentation unless you have an account with them, this kind of thing.

And then there are the open-source vendors, which used to not really be considered much, but they actually have started to do very well, for certain types of scenarios. Among them are Camunda and Activiti, and another one called Bonita, although I'm not really sure - its heritage is definitely open-source. But all of those open-source solutions have an enterprise version. Their approach to marketing is open-source, but they'll still sell you an enterprise license.

I rate IBM BPM a seven out of 10. It's good but it needs some help.

Mostly for business orchestrations, and developing the process applications within Wells Fargo Advisors, and we have other lines of business like retirement, wealth, etc. So we basically build the process models for all the internal back-office operations.

We started four years ago with one or two process apps, but now we've got close to 40. So that's a lot of incremental development in the last three years.

We have a legacy product, called MQ Workflow, and we developed so many process apps using that tool, but we migrated everything to BPM three years ago. The best part is the orchestration simplicity. However, we do have some issues, but, as we work on those challenges, I think overall, product-wise, it is pretty good.

I checked out a session, here at the Think 2018 conference. They basically merged the old BPM with the Case Manager, PFS, etc. That's pretty good, but we need to figure out how we can better use the Case Manager and PFS with that existing business flow.

It is pretty much stable. We had some hiccups in the beginning, because of the product learning curve. But once we got the environment stabilized, we have hardly seen problems, from a BPM standpoint. We do have other components like, the LDAP and databases, and the ASM F5 Web tier, but from a BPM product standpoint, I think it's pretty good.

It's scalable. We started with three nodes on day one. We expanded to five nodes, then we basically had two other engines, so we have about 15 now.

But there is a limit. There is a point where you stop, you can't scale anymore to improve the performance. But for now, I think we are okay.

We have engagement, whenever there is an issue we open a ticket with IBM, depending on the severity, whether it's two, three, sometimes one, if production is down. The people who we work with are pretty responsible, most of the time. Again, not every time, but when it comes to the production and management, I think we get good response.

We do have a liaison between Wells Fargo and IBM who takes care of high-priority tasks with Wells Fargo. They escalate, sometimes it goes to labs, level 2. We don't see any problems where nobody is looking at it and we're struggling, nothing like that. People are helping.

I think we had some assistance from IBM, for a few months. After that, in-house, we pretty much took care of handling it.

I would rate BPM an eight out of 10. Again, this is all from my infrastructure platform support standpoint. We do have a lot of application development, testing teams, QA teams, they also interact with the BPM product. But my job is more platform topology, architecture.

Most of the use cases are for fraud investigations and managing the cases. We also use it regarding account opening. It's all related to financial services and banking, so it's all about account opening, fraud investigations, KYC, pretty much around the financial services processes.

We use it for workflow management. For example, when the customer requests opening of an account, they reach out to the customer and they initiate the process. Then it goes through the KYC process and it comes to the account executives to determine whether they are eligible to open the account. And of course, there would be a career check as well. So that workflow is actually implemented very well using BPM.

At this moment we are not using it in conjunction with IBM Case Manager or any other IBM automation products.

It has been used in multiple LOBs and a lot of benefits have been identified. There is a good return on investment, because some of them were using paper-based processing, and introducing BPM has actually improved the time involved.

Regarding any impact on our ability to change or update processes, as I said, most of the paper-based work was converted into an automated workflow process, and some of them were converted into straight-through processing, with no human interaction involved whatsoever.

The UI-based workflow, where a lot of human interactions are involved.

It's a bit technical, related to the instance of migrations. It's a tough thing to handle, in every new release, in every upgrade, that we have to do things in the applications or in the product. I think IBM is working on it but I know there are a lot of requests coming in from different organizations on this. 

Stability is pretty good. Many users, concurrent users especially, are using the application built on BPM, so it is good.

We did have multiple setups where the system was scaled to have more users when there was an expansion.

We do use them often, in terms of working with product-based issues or product-relevant problems. 

We have received good response whenever we engage IBM support for issues. We did get some help from IBM support on some of the BPM-related issues, even though they were not relevant to product. Certain kinds of consultations were answered.

I would say clients prefer to go with IBM, versus competitors, because of the support, and product releases, upgrades or updates or new features that come up very often, in the last couple of years. That has improved compared to two or three years ago.

I would say it's medium-complex. It's not highly complex but, yes, since there are a lot of integrations, it's kind of complex.

As I was explaining elsewhere in this review, regarding the paper-based workflow, there were multiple business professionals involved, but now, with BPM, they actually do not work on paper, they do everything online. So they do better work than just filling the paper or processing it.

Pega, obviously, is currently one of the main competitors to IBM BPM. I think Pega is actually doing pretty well compared to IBM currently, and I think IBM RPA should do well going forward.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor include looking at 

• the licensing cost, obviously
• the infrastructure needed
• scalability
• resiliency of the product
• the enterprise direction, where they are headed. 

Most of the time, time to market is also a consideration. IBM BPM does these pretty well.

We are doing a lot of transaction processing for 401ks, moving processes out of a legacy workflow system into IBM BPM.

Our workflow processes are initiated from the web. They will start a process on the back-end, and move throughout all the steps necessary to process distributions, loans, and relevant transactional work. 

We started with Process Server, even before IBM BPM, so it was 2006 to 2007. When IBM bought Lombardi, we converted over. So, it has been quite a while.

It has improved my organization quite a bit. It brought awareness to what our business processes are, even to the business side, who did not necessarily know what they are.

There are a lot of things that you get out-of-the-box: Timers and so on, which took a lot of effort and code before.

It is being able to see the process, and understanding what the process is versus having to bury it in code somewhere. 

Better reporting. I do not think that we are fully taking advantage of what it already has yet.

I have an interest around the robotic piece, and integrating that with the processes. I think that is certainly a good direction to be going. 

So far, it is stable. We do not have a ton of processes moved over yet, but the ones we do have seem to be working pretty well.

We still have a lot to move to figure it out.

I have not had to deal with that side of things. We do not have anything that is down, so I am guessing technical support must be doing okay.

We have a different area that works with getting everything built up and installed. The migration process sometimes is a little bit hairy going from one version of a progress to another. Other people take care of it, so I do not have to worry about it.

It is a pretty good product. It does everything we need it to do.

We do claims processing and BPM is the product that we use to have the member ID's and codes added to it.

Process Portal is where most of our business users log in and complete their work, that's the main use of interface. 

We don't use it in conjunction with IBM Case Manager or any other IBM information product.

It is helpful in processing at least 200K claims, so during open enrollment it's huge for our company.

It saves a lot of manual work, a lot of data entry work. That's how it has positively impacted our processes.

The workflows, and using them to process the claims and send files back.

It will be good to have the RPA. I learned that that's coming up, the workflows are going to have RPA in them, so I'm looking forward to that.

Except for the Lucene the index - we had a couple of issues in the Process Portal where the Lucene index went out of sync, and we had to work at least 15 - 20 hours to have it back in sync with the database. So that was big for us last year. 

If that's improved, or if that's removed, or if there is a workaround for the Lucene index issue, that would be great. 

Scalability is good. We are looking into rolling out BPM for newer projects as well. I can't say we are seeing an ROI from being able to scale with it.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. We worked directly with IBM.

I rate it a nine out of 10. It's not a 10 because of the Lucene index issue. That cost us a lot of efforts in the production environment.

It's a good solution in terms of stability and processing and response. We haven't ventured much on the other features that IBM BPM gives, like Business Space and Business Process Choreographer. I think other than the Process Portal issue, the other things are good.

We use BPM in order to process the entire data flow between our different applications to enable the data steward to take actions on some of the data quality issues. 

It was implemented last year. We have been in production a couple of months now. We have a team of data stewards who look at different data to determine and enable our master data management within the bank.

We implemented a couple of different workflows targeted towards different actions. For example, we have an MDM, the master data management platform. We have different clients' profiles coming in from different sources. So, sometimes we will get duplicates, and sometimes we get suspect duplicates. We implemented those workflows to trigger different actions, so the data steward can fix the data or take a human action to move the process forward.

IBM BPM is integrated into the master data management platform, so the MDM advanced edition. They are coupled together right now. 

It has brought huge benefits to our organization. In the past, we had some automated processes which were hard to implement along with all the business processes that went with it. We have been able to marry these two things, automating and taking actions on data issues quickly.

Automating the whole workflow process to give our data steward the ability to take actions rapidly, and making sure we have all the data synced within the different platforms that we are using.

We are still discovering the potential of the solution, so we are not at this stage yet. There is a lot still to discover and implement. Maybe in a couple of months or next year, we will be able to see what exactly our needs are. Maybe it will be some functionality that the current software does not offer, but we are not at this stage yet.

We still have a couple of issues that we are working on right now. Mostly on the configuration side of the tool, and it has been about a month that we have been working to stabilize the platform.

It is not relevant for IBM BPM.

We are in contact with IBM technical support and labs. We deal with external firms, who develop a couple of workflows that we use. We are trying right now to solve the stability issues.

We have a team who worked initially on defining the solutions, getting the business needs, and getting all the technical documentation for it to be implemented. I personally managed the development team to develop these workflows and put them into production.

It was not hard to set up. It was more tweaking and optimization going forward, but the initial setup was not an issue.

With these workflows, there are people like the data steward who work on them, so it is not really initiating new workflows. There were workflows that already existed, but maybe in an old fashioned way.

This tool fits within the data strategy at the bank. It was part of our roadmap that we worked on for the last couple of years. It was at the right time. It was for the right context as you need a sponsorship from the business and from the Chief Data Officer, so all those things came together to move forward with BPM, MDM, and different platforms.

It was a combination of an IBM partner and IBM support. We have an IBM partner, who works with us to develop and implement the tool. We work with IBM support too for the whole configuration and the infrastructure side of it.

It is an automated optimized way to ensure the quality of our data and staying synced to our old platform.

At the bank, we have several tools from IBM, so it came up as part of a bundle/package.

The interesting part is the integration of this tool within other IBM tools. It makes it easier to implement and maintain later on. I would definitely recommend it from this point of view.

We use it for eligibility of inbound data, so anything coming from the clients, loading it into our system. We have a product called Peer, and we use the BPM tool within Peer for business monitoring, dashboard for business, so they can monitor the status of the files.

When a file comes in it has to decide whether it has to decrypt the file - some of the files are encrypted - or whether we have to unzip the file, and which platform to send it to - we have multiple platforms. It has some intelligent process built in, so it knows exactly where to send it. And there is a lot of reporting coming out of this product too.

We're not using it with IBM Case Manager or any other IBM automation tool.

There is a lot of visibility now. It used to be a black box, but with BPM business has more visibility into where the process is.

We like the dashboard feature.

The business side says it needs more visibility into the process. Right now it's the basic stuff, that's what they see, but they want to see more features. We are exploring what other possibilities are there. Currently, it shows them where the process is, right on the file, whether the main adjudication system is processing the file or not. But if something fails, they want to see more information, like where exactly it failed, etc.

It has been really stable the last couple of years. Initially we had issues with stability. It was not the product itself, it was the platform we had it on. But it's stable now, I don't see any issues.

We don't use heavy BPM processing with what we have. I know it is more scalable. We recently acquired another company, so we are trying to see if this can be used for all the eligibility stuff, but that is still in the initial analysis phase.

We have definitely seen revenue and income as a result of implementing BPM; it's basically the eligibility, the whole application, that flows through this product called Peer.

We had to use tech support a couple of times, when we had an issue with the application. There are a lot of MQs connecting to the main core adjudication system, and we had failures with those MQs, which was impacting the BPM processes. So we had to engage IBM at that time.

They were definitely helpful. Our SLA is for a tier-one application, so it has to be resolved within an hour. So we engaged IBM.

We worked with IBM for the initial setup.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is stability and support.

BPM is an established tool, there shouldn't be any second thoughts about using it. 

BPM is one of several IBM products, part of a big platform that we have, which includes BPM, ODM, IIB, MQ, and DataPower Gateway, as well as API Connect. It's a part of a big solution. The idea of this big platform was to go from our old, monolithic development environments that were static, to something that is much more flow-oriented, and much faster to develop.

We are a logistics company, and everything is "events." The old fashion way to solve everything that was event-related was to store it in a database, and use and treat the data once it was in the database. Today, what we want to do - and we are on the verge of doing this with a new product, with a new platform - is to treat the data and to treat the flow as soon as it comes. If it can be automated like in BPM, we do it based on rules because we have them on ODM. The idea is really to treat the data as soon as it comes, and to have exactly the right decision, based on our rules of course. Once we get the information, be as fast as possible. Because in our company, really, delays are money.

We are not yet using BPM in conjunction with Case Manager.

For us, it's really the speed of the decision; the possibility to really automate the decision, based on the rules that you can pre-program.

Its automation.

I already know what is going to come in the next release because we had a discussion with BPM.

Where it can be improved is Integration. I think that the direction that IBM is taking now, to have something that is much more integrated, that can be seen as one single solution, is clearly the right way.

It's stable. We haven't faced any huge issue with it, up to now.

It's scalable. We don't have problems with the scalability. The first prerequisite for it is really to define what the rules are, and the way to use it.

I have been using IBM technical support for about 20 years. In any cases, whether it be for support, in case of a crash, or any other issue, I never had any bad feeling about support. It was fast, and they always had accurate solutions.

I was not personally involved in the initial setup because I am in operations. The initial setup was driven by our architects. However, the environment, as the first shot, was completely done under the guidance of IBM.

In terms of timing of the implementation of BPM, I would have liked to have had it 10 years earlier.

I was not involved in the decision-making process.

If time matters, if your company has a lot of processes that could be automated, BPM is the right solution, definitely.