IBM BPM Reviews

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.

Primary use case is to process a lot of the workflows for the different companies that we support within the insurance industry.

So far, it's performing really well. We've been migrating everything off an old BPM system into this, to keep it more modern. And so far, so good. It gives us a lot of functionality.

In terms of how it's used as a workflow platform to manage our processes, I can't really talk to that. I'm more on the technical side, I install the product. I don't do any of the development or workflow management pieces of it. I just get it running and make it available so they can use it.

I don't know. Our team doesn't actually use the product. We install it, configure it, set it up.

I think the best way it can be it improved, is to make it easier to install. It's a very complicated piece of software, and there are a lot of things you have to do to get it set up.

It's not just running an installer. You install WebSphere. You install the BPM product, and there's a large host of other steps you have to do: run queries against the database, manually configure a bunch of properties files for your environment. I think if they could streamline all that, so it wasn't a considerable effort to install, that would be very useful. Because from an engineering point of view, you want to spend as little time as possible actually installing a product.

I believe the install was supported by IBM itself. I don't know that we went through a vendor or a partner for that.

Stability seems pretty good. We have quite a bit of work being done on them right now. We had to build out a pretty large system for it, but so far it's been really stable.

Scalability is a little bit tough, but I probably think that has more to do with how we have it set up, as opposed to the product itself.

It's been pretty good. They're really good at providing good feedback, as opposed to a lot of support programs which will actually do their own little run book. They actually listen, more often than not. What little I've had to use them for BPM usually involved the installation step, and I found them really useful for that.

Be sure to thoroughly read the technical documentation on the product first, so you know what you're getting into. When I first had to do it, I just figured I would go to IBM documentation and follow the steps and not read it ahead of time. I realized that it was much more complicated than that, which is why I come back to my earlier statement of make it easier to install.

I think it's incredibly powerful so I give it a solid eight out of 10. Our user base seems to be really happy with it. It's just from the technical side, I'd like it to be a little easier.

We've been using BPM for most of the enrollment process, for banking, infrastructure, the financial side. So we've been using BPM to improve our business management process.

Performance so far has been pretty good. We've been using for almost five years now. A lot of auditing is in there, so we're pretty good with it.

We will be using the automation product, that's a new version, I think. These are new things we just learned about it. So we'll be discussing that more now.

The audit functionality.

IBM BPM has had an impact on our ability to change or update our processes in a good way. We have improved our process with it.

The business process management, where we can avoid lot of paperwork.

I'm more on the infrastructure side, not on the development side of it. So I'm not sure I can answer this. It's scalable right now from the infrastructure perspective. But I'm not sure of the development side of it. I'm not a developer.

The latest versions have been more stable. Initially, we were using older versions. With the latest version it is more stable.

It's pretty good. I would rate it eight or nine out of 10.

I'm not sure if we've seen ROI as a result of implementing BPM.

It's pretty good. We've been on calls with IBM. We have a technical account manager, so it's pretty good. I can almost rate it 10 out of 10. Good relationship.

Mainly for auditing purposes, and security concerns. That's why we started using the BPM tool.

When looking at vendors, we do a PoC with them to find out their support structure, etc.

I was not involved in the initial setup. It was done in-house.

Right now we're looking at BP3.

On the infrastructure side, I'd rate this a 10 out of 10.

I would recommend this solution, it's a pretty stable, good environment and platform for business process management. 

We're using BPM in our policy area for when we deploy new rates. We're an insurance company. We change rates based on market trends, or analysis, or new vehicles in the market. We try to get those change requests in, process them, and get them back out so our rates are updated for market share.

We had been using a process that was very manually intensive. We use BPM to take that manual process and automate it from start to finish. When the product manager requests a change, it will go to the pricing analyst, they'll do their work and it's all organized and coordinated in sequence, so that they can make the right decisions at the right times for the process. And hopefully reduce the time that we get the rate revisions out to market.

We're not using it with Case Manager, it's just BPM exclusively at this point. In terms of workflow process, as I mentioned, the request comes in and it follows a sequence of events. The pricing analysts that work on these requests, they have a lot of decisions to make, a lot of documentation to look at based on state regulations or different product types. This helps them organize that and presents the information to them at the right step of the process, so they're not spending extra time searching through hundreds of pages of documentation to try to find what they need. It's all right there as they work through the process.

Right now we're about eight months in, and the processes are long. They can take multiple weeks, so we haven't had a chance to go through a number of those to realize the benefits. But just word of mouth, and talking to people using it, they're seeing value in more efficiency in the steps that they're working through, they have documentation presented to them. Word of mouth has been great, but we haven't actually seen the numbers yet because it's just been implemented recently.

It is having an impact on our ability to change or update our processes. There is information during the process that the analyst will look at, their procedures. We created a part of the application such that the business can change those procedures as needed, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. As the reps go through the process, they don't necessarily know it's changing, they just know they have to refer to some documentation, and the business can keep that up to date. That's been a great way for them to make those changes quickly as they need to.

It's really helped our customers learn the process. Before you go into BPM you have to document the process. Working with the different groups that are involved with the process, there was good collaboration so they understand what the process is and how it can be most efficient, prior to adding the tool on top of it.

So, process analysis first and then applying the tooling, it's been working great.

I would like to see more inclusion of RPA technologies. If we have more manual processes, we can use robotic process automation and integrate that in with the solution. Other than that, it's meeting our needs with what the requirements were.

In production, it's great. We have about 60 or so users, so it's small. We are in the cloud. There was some learning early on in development of the application. We just had one, sometimes two, developers, and there were some things that we had to do in the cloud to allow for the performance. It was taking up memory and we didn't know it. We had to work with IBM support, create some scripts to clean up the environment on a weekly basis, so that we weren't loading up memory.

It was a little challenging early on because we had just started. We were having problems right away with just two developers, but we got it sorted out and support helped.

We haven't had an opportunity to scale it. From what I understand about the architecture, it's definitely scalable to the enterprise. But we haven't used it in that capacity yet.

We just have the one application and it has not been in production long enough to really see the ROI yet, in terms of scaling. But based on the project, cost benefit analysis early on, it was showing positive. But we're not there yet.

It's been good. They've been responsive. We've been able to escalate when we needed to. We haven't had any incidents in production. It was just, while we were developing a solution, working with it, there were some issues early on, and support was great.

No solution previously. We've been discussing BPM for a number of years, just looking for the right use case and the right time to do it.

When selecting a vendor, typically we look to see if we have strategic partners, strategic relationships with larger vendors, like IBM; if they have the product that meets the requirements. We tend to look at analyst information to say, "Okay, who are the players in this particular space?" We tend to go with that as a starting place, and go from there. If they're someone we're already doing business with, and we have a strategic relationship with them, that will be our first point of reference, and then look at the requirements, can they meet the requirements?

We went with IBM largely due to, from what I gather, the requirements, the technology and functionality, were very similar. And we weren't doing business with the other vendors, while IBM, we are.

It was straightforward from our perspective. It was in the cloud, they provisioned the instance for us. However, I think there were some things that we didn't know about that needed to be fixed, and those incidents happened early on. We were a little bit caught off guard. 

We thought there might have been a little more discussion early on about, "Hey, if you're doing this, set it up this way," or some best practices or some guidance that we didn't get. But we fixed the issues and were able to work through that. From that point on, it's been good.

We worked with IBM to implement. I think we implemented it at the right time. I don't think we needed to have started earlier. The business unit that's using it had some overarching projects to look at, in terms of efficiency and improving speed to market. As they were looking at different technologies or process improvements, one of the options was to try to clean up this process. In working with them and working with IT, we landed on using BPM for that. It was actually good timing for their overarching goals. They have other projects in flight that will work in parallel with this to hopefully reduce the time to market.

I think this solution is an eight out of 10. It has a strong place in the market. BPM is one of the leading tools, if not the best BPM solution out there. It has extensibility across the platform to allow you to do any number of things. It gives you scalability and functionality, breadth to handle just about anything you need to do.

Regarding advice, if you're not using a partner, use a partner, or use IBM to get some consulting services to help you get started. They have some quick-win programs that are designed to come in, they'll bring a developer in and they'll work with your developer to get you started. That's what we did and that worked really great. We got an understanding of the product, we got an understanding of how to deploy the product. And when we were done with that engagement, we were off and running. I would definitely say go that route. It works.

I work for an insurance company and we use BPM to digitize two of our main claiming processes, to make them paperless.

We use it as a workflow platform and little more than that, because they are interconnected with other platforms of ours: our legacy systems, our customers, our partners, providers, etc. There are two BPM applications we developed with IBM, as a partner, to follow the bottlenecks and those kinds of things. So, I would say that it is more than a workflow software for us.

One of the most notable things is how you can develop use cases with the customers, internal customers, but directly within. The software process model that BPM supports is really exciting in that aspect. The natural interconnection with other IBM products is sure: WebSphere Portal, FileNet. We interconnect all of those.

We haven't discovered what features could be added, yet. We are still in the early phases, and it has more features than we are using now.

The people working on the front desk are having some problem with managing the documentation. For instance, they get a picture, and if the picture comes rotated 90 degrees, together with a picture that is not rotated, they have some problems dealing with that, technically. There are some minor aspects that on the usability side that are still lacking. That has to do with FileNet, too, I'm talking about the suite together.

One of the processes, the one that we developed first, is running okay. The other one is not, but I attribute that to the fact that we are still in the rollout process, and it's still in the early stages of development.

In terms of ROI through scaling, one of the processes we automatated with BPM is running smoothly with fewer people than before, and in fact the size of the demand has scaled, very notably. We haven't calculated it yet, but it's really returning on the investment.

I think it will meet our needs going forward. And they better make sure it does.

Support is good. They had to escalate internally, in order to get some more expert advice internally, but it was okay.

We've been helped by IBM staff, but there was no problem there. We used BPM on Cloud for development, testing, and pre-prod, and we used the on-premises for production, and everything is working properly.