IBM BPM Reviews

We use it to architect our core services and business processes. For example, my company is responsible for issuing licenses to oil and gas vendors who operate petrol and gas stations. This is a very complex process starting from submission of the license request to the approval by the minister's office, and then checking the localization policy to see where they can give approval. We use IBM BPM in a plethora of complex processes in different areas of our business.

Initially, the process architecture studio was very helpful and it was compliant with BPMN standards. In the beginning it definitely gave us mileage in terms of business process designing, but nowadays, there are very good and smart tools that have OCR and AI facilities. Currently, the tool looks quite ineffective in a digital transformation environment. We're a mix of proprietary and open source tools, and we don't find IBM very inclusive.

IBM, as a suite, is becoming more and more obsolete because it obliges the customer to buy multiple tools for the same purpose. For example, BPM is only for architecting the business process workflow, and then you need to integrate it with the DataPower solution to bring in the data. There are also other tools for the process mining part that are not a part of BPM. From a business perspective, to achieve one goal we have to license multiple IBM tools on-premise, whereas there are other competitive tools that are assembled and engineered on one platform, and can be utilized in a much simpler and more seamless way. That is why we're finding it very difficult to continue working with the IBM stack. They need to unify the process landscape into one engine.

AI-enabled BPM tools are more relevant these days, where you use artificial intelligence to understand process pitfalls and you apply that in your process design and logic. I would like IBM to consider including AI-enabled process mining, robotic process automation, and very good OCR capabilities from the computer vision side.

I have been working with this solution for five years. 

The stability is good. I would give it a seven out of ten.

The scalability of the solution is high. It's a seven out of ten. 

We have a team of about six people, our business analysis team, who run the solution. There are about 2,000 end users. 

From a user-friendliness perspective, I would rate it as a six out of ten. There was definitely a learning curve to adopt the tool and understand all of its features, but once learned, it was a very good tool for that period of time - about four or five years ago.

Our deployment was done by SBM, Saudi Business Machine, which is the Saudi partner of IBM Global. Our solution designer worked with a business process architect, middleware solution designer, and tool specialists from IBM. There were around eight consultants on the IBM team from different technical backgrounds. Our deployment involved the entire middleware with BPM and DataPower. It took around one and a half years.

Now, our IBM BPM maintenance is outsourced. There is a contract team of three engineers who are maintaining the software because a lot of processes are housed on IBM BPM and the processes need tweaks from time to time.

I would say the ROI is moderate because the license prices are high and the operation and maintenance cost is high. Just like Oracle ERP, you rarely see an ROI, but it becomes intrinsic to your organization. It's the same with any BPM tool. Even if you don't have a very high ROI, somehow you get captivated, locked into the tool.

I would say the ROI is a six out of ten.

The pricing is very high. On a scale of one to ten, if ten is high, I would say it's an eight. The total cost of ownership over a period of time is very high.

It is usually a one-year license. Last time, for a better price, we paid for three years upfront.  

I would rate this solution as a six out of ten.

I suggest that those looking into this tool do proper benchmarking and visit the Gartner and Forrester reports and PeerSpot reports before choosing IBM. Also, if they are going for this tool, it is better to have a strong in-house team for not only deployment, but also utilizing the tool later on.

The most valuable feature of IBM BPM is the low code design, and ease of maintenance. Additionally, the integration is good and easy to do.

IBM BPM can improve the dashboards and reports. It only has two dashboards, and reporting is very difficult to build.

I have been using IBM BPM for approximately five years.

IBM BPM is a stable solution.

The scalability of IBM BPM is good. It's easy to add features and applications to the platform.

I have approximately 10 customers, with each having an average of approximately 300 users.

The support for IBM BPM is good.

I have not used other solutions in this category.

The initial setup of IBM BPM is easy to do. The implementation time depends on the business that the solution is being put into. It typically takes six months to one year to complete the process. For a deployment that is easy, the process could take only a few hours.

We have two to three administrators that support IBM BPM.

My advice to others is this is a good solution and they can find a lot of advantages. I recommend this solution to many users.

I rate IBM BPM an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for business workflow automation.

It is a a very powerful solution.

It is not user-friendly and requires a knowledgeable and skilled user to work with it. If an end-user has no idea about the technology, they will have difficulties. The product requires the end user to be skilled with prerequisites and have the ability to configure and tailor the product to express the workflow. Most IBM products in layer seven, middleware or the application layer, are not user-friendly.

The workflow is also difficult. In any organization, many departments are involved in the workflow from the start to the end of the procedure. That's why we must be aware of an organization's manual process to reflect it in the product. The product could ask the user questions, and based on the answers, it can develop the workflow, which makes it much easier.

We have been using this solution for more than 12 years. It is deployed on private cloud.

It is a stable and powerful solution.

It is a scalable solution, and one small company that is a customer uses this solution. They do tender development proposal evaluations for clients.

The initial setup was easy but using it after became a bit challenging. Deployment took about one day, and we are a big organization.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. I would advise others to compare IBM BPM with other equivalent products in the market before deciding.

BPM is an internal workload tool, so I use it to move the funds between different accounts for client onboarding.

The most valuable features are the integration capabilities - BPM can connect with almost any legacy or advanced system - and that you can design and implement UIs.

BPM could be improved with more flexibility in integration and by decreasing the learning curve, which keeps increasing with each new version.

I've worked with this solution for ten years.

The stability varies because it involves a lot of other components like databases, so sometimes if something goes wrong there, it can't recover from the fatal errors.

BPM is scalable, though not automatically.

IBM's technical support is pretty good.

The initial setup is of medium complexity.

As long as you have clear use cases, you can do pretty much whatever you want with this tool. I would rate BPM as eight out of ten.

We were using IBM BPM as part of our business automation solution. It was used to assist in automation during our RPA implementation. 

IBM BPM is stable.

We didn't do a more thorough investigation to figure out which features were missing. We just decided to go with a more programmatical approach.

We only used IBM BPM for a very short time—something like a year—and we decommissioned it already.

I cannot say how scalable IBM BPM is. It was stable, but we did not need to scale it. We have 7,000 employees total. However, since the solution is automated, there are no actual users — just automated tasks. So it would be equivalent to 10 or 15 users or something like that.

We probably contacted IBM support at some point in time, but we had no issue with BPM. 

We had been using Drools for some other BPM implementations.

We had a yearly license. I believe that if the license were cheaper, it would have a greater impact.

I rate IBM BPM seven out of 10. I would say it's an option to consider, but I wouldn't recommend it since we've switched to another tool.

We use IBM BPM for banking purposes and other banking service-related queries.

IBM BPM is easy when it comes to creating processes. 

It has an elaborated way to explore the IBM BPM processes.

Anyone can easily learn how to use IBM BPM, within a period of a month or two.

The integration could be improved.

I have been using IBM BPM for six months.

We are using the latest version, which is V8. 

It is based on the local server.

IBM BPM is a stable product.

IBM BPM is a scalable solution.

We have 100 users in our organization.

We have not contacted technical support.

We have recently changed to Camunda BPM.

It is easy to install. It only took 10 to 15 minutes to complete the installation.

The guides are available on social websites.

IBM BPM is one of the several BPM tools that we are working with. Currently, our technical team is working on 50 to 70.

We were able to complete the installation ourselves.

This is a tool that I would strongly recommend to others.

I would rate IBM BPM a nine out of ten.

I am a Solution Architect and I support both cloud and on-premise versions of IBM BPM. I use the solution for banking applications, such as account opening, fund transfers, corporate and credit limit approval process. In the insurance sector, digitalization, underwriting, life insurance claim settlement process, and vehicle claim settlement process. 

This solution has always been lacking in the user interface (UI), it needed to be improved a lot. However, from the acquisition of Spark UI, the UI is much better. Overall the solution is robust and has the ability to integrate with any product for complex workflows.

IBM BPM integrated with Spark UI and the UI is now much better, but they still need to improve the UI because competitors have predefined templates and other additional features. In these competitor's solutions, you are able to use the templates, map your data, and the form is ready to use. With this solution, you need to write a lot of code to have the same quality as the competitor's templates. It would be a benefit to make this platform more towards low-code or no-code. 

The REST web service integration needs to improve by providing other features, such as different security options.

In an upcoming release, they should add video calling capabilities to the solution. I work mainly in the Middle Eastern market and many of the bank companies use video Know-Your-Customer (KYC) to call the customer directly from the BPM tool. They do this for customer verification, such as document and identity authentications. Additionally, every organization at some point would like to send out letters to their customers, for example, welcome letters, but there is no easy way to do it with this IBM BPM. There needs to be a template available or an attachable generated PDF document that can be made easily within this solution.

I have been using this solution for approximately 10 years.

This solution is very stable. When looking at all the features reliability is one of the strongest points of this solution. It has greater scalability and stability compared to the other competitors, such as Appian.

The scalability is really good. The scalability of IBM BPM is one of the best in the market because you can scale seamlessly. You can add any number of user licenses, CPU cores, or other components.

Most of the customers I have are enterprise companies using this solution.

The support is not very good. When we raise the Problem Management Report (PMR) for any support, they usually take a long time to respond. They tend to ask a lot of questions instead of evaluating the system themselves by doing screen sharing sessions or other troubleshooting evaluations. There are times when we finally get a response from support but the solution they gave is not helpful and the issue remains.

I rate IBM BPM customer support as seven out of ten.

I have been using this solution for a long time and for me the setup is not difficult. However, it is a little complex if it is your first time or when you compare it to competitors. The length of time it takes to do the setup depends on the hardware environment, but it typically does not take very long.

The price of the solution is fair for an enterprise solution that has both cloud and on-premise deployments and when comparing to competitors. Recently IBM has introduced Cloud Pak which allows for more flexible licensing options for automation and other features.

I have evaluated Appian.

I rate IBM BPM a nine out of ten.

I'm a consultant. We are working for a consulting company, and we initiate solutions in IBM BPM at the moment, mostly for banks.

Overall, I'm satisfied with the product. It has a lot of capabilities and potential. 

This is technology, and there's always room for improvement. It would be better to have a single solution. Trying to have an overview in terms of this solution brings together the concepts of BPM processes, customer journeys, and an automation part for KPIs. All of this working together and coming up with a single solution with privacy is more commercial than anything else.

Because when you try and initiate things, we see that it's two different applications. But there's an effort to combine all of these applications and have an overview of internal processes. I believe they are making investments in this part, but they are probably delayed a bit.

Adding a control app or something easier in terms of maintaining the versioning will help. Make it easier to manage the patches so you can just do it and move on to the next one. Every time we tried to meet to do some upgrade of a version of the solution, it was a lot of work. Even minor upgrades always required a significant amount of work in intensities and trials.

From our side and our core customers, we didn't get any complaints.

Depending on the geographical area you're in, depending on the relevance of your customer, and if it's a big customer, the support goes very well. We don't have many complaints. If it's a smaller client in a smaller country, sometimes the support is delayed a bit, and we get some pushing from their side to make sure that we have a proper response.

We also have projects in our systems and projects with Comunda, and we are doing some parallelly. We also have some experience in using the BPMO methods and Software AG. It's not great, but for small things, it does the trick in terms of the licenses model. Sometimes depending on the situation, it becomes much more interesting for some of our clients.

The initial setup is kind of a pain when compared with other solutions like Comunda, which is more or less like plug-and-play and quite easy. The solution is quite quick in terms of IBM, and it's a bit more complex. Especially if you're talking about having a more enterprise environment, it becomes a bit complex. You have to configure a lot of additional components from that infrastructure to make sure it's running okay, and sometimes it becomes a bit complex.

It's expensive. All software is always extremely high. The manufacturing cost that we have compared to the selling cost, it's not like you're building a house or building a car. But putting that aside, considering that it's expensive, it's a lot of money. If you compare it with some of the other alternatives in the market, it's a similar price. For instance, if you compare it with Pegasystems, it's a similar price.

If you're talking about smaller companies or smaller clients, probably they're going for something more simple like Comunda or something else because it's much cheaper. Even the support becomes much cheaper than getting a full IBM BPM solution. 

If you're a very big company or a bank or don't want any headaches, you would probably prefer IBM. You know the old saying that no one has ever been fired for buying IBM. It's one of those things, and that rule still applies. 

I would advise potential users to get proper training and figure out the most suitable version that they need. Because in terms of internal versions and support, they need to be careful. Like all software, the latest versions always include some bugs. Older versions lack some support. You need to be careful about that. 

Have a proper solution architect that knows enough about the BPM system's ins and outs to make sure that you have proper internal support in terms of projects. Apart from that, try to build a close relationship with the vendor.

People who come from different technology backgrounds have some difficulty getting used to working with IBM products. If you compare it with other products, it's probably not as easygoing or as simple to implement as the rest. But after you get used to it, it works.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give IBM BPM an eight.