IBM BPM Reviews

Process automation.

• Traceability
• Fewer humans errors.

The integration layer is powerful in the advanced version.

It should have a more powerful and faster form builder, also the license is complex using PVUs.

Excellent but some network latency should be prevented for development since Web Process Designer is collaborative and distributed

Very good! horizontally and vertically

no

I was a consumer of the IBM products and implement IBM BPM in Latin America. I stopped being an end user of IBM products in past year, but still implement products.

Primary use case is more than 80 percent financial services, banks mainly, but also insurance:

• Banks or organizations use it for credit cards or for opening accounts. 
• Insurance use it for checking insurance claims.

It excels at analytics. It provides visibility across all activities of a company's processes and performance. It shows the activities, who is performing the activities, and all the values around the activities: the when, how much, and how many. 

It helps improve your process through continual measurement. The idea is to have a flexible process without too much programming.

It has an appealing DSA key interface. It is an out-of-the-box screen. It is uncommon among tools in the market. You don't need to switch between interfaces because everything inside the same tool. It provides a faster result for less money.

An advantage of the BPM is you can complete the user cycle of a BPM solution to identify the process and model it, then compute, execute, and measure on the tool, and finally it will improve the process inside the tool. You can complete the whole lifecycle of a process inside the tool. First, you should identify the part you want to improve, set up a goal for that improvement, set the scope, and obtain a sponsor. Once you do that, you put a plan in place and the next step is to define the process, define each activity, and the roles. The next step is to define the screen for the end user and its relationship with other system, then put the process in place. This implies putting in place an application and developing over BPM which will have the activities, processes, roles, and screens. After that, it's only measuring and improving the process in the BPM tool.

The simulation feature is great and provides a lot of value, but its complex to use. People need a high level of statistics to use it.

IBM can handle anything. IBM BPM can handle a lot of variables on an environment when you pass through a lot of transactions simultaneously.

It is extremely scalable.

The technical support is good. They have good people working for them at IBM, who are knowledgeable and responsive. You need to have also good counterparties on your side to ask the right questions.

I used to work with Oracle BPM, but they changed the product's landscape. Instead of retraining, we changed to IBM BPM (Lombardi at the time).

The initial setup depends on your environment. If it's a standard implementation, it is out-of-the-box and could be done in a two hours. A more complex environment could be more difficult to set up.

I am the implementer of the solution for clients.

The volume of transactions a team can perform or execute generally increases. For example, I worked with a company using IBM BPM to decrease the time for obtaining a credit card from three days to 15 minutes.

The price is not great. 

The cloud and license of the subscription model for IBM BPM can be complex. There are a lot of alternatives to choose from, like a VAR, partner, or sales team from IBM. There might also be push back from the hardware team to be on-premise.

I recently began working with Red Hat BPM JBoss BPM because IBM has became complex on its pricing.

We also evaluate companies like Bonita, Documentum, and ProcessMaker BPM. We did also consider Bonita when we were looking at Red Hat, but they don't have offices in Mexico.

It is the Ferrari of BPM tools.

To implement this product, you should have a process department and an ERP. Without an ERP solution, the transactionality of the BPM will not work.

IBM Case Manager can assist you if you have a process that is unstructured. It is a very advanced tool, but very expensive.

When I am looking at selecting a vendor for my client, I consider:

• The size of the initiative
• The cost of the licensing or subscription
• Training
• Availability of a consultant to implement the solution.

I was a previous IBM partner in Mexico and Peru.

My primary use case is to take a lot of the business processes from the client portfolio and smoothly, seamlessly transfer it over into a solution for them to grow their business. The key ideas are to eliminate a lot of the proprietary footprint in development and try to seamlessly go with their business logic in a framework, which we have developed, and be able to mitigate a lot of the risk and to make the front-end interaction with the customer optimal.

We use the solution as a workflow platform to manage processes. It really gets into understanding the business logic of the clients, seeing how closely that aligns with the frameworks that we've built out in the BPM portfolio, and keeping that locked into the solution.

In some of our use cases, we have used it in conjunction with IBM Case Manager and other IBM automation products.

Having good experience with the portfolio of IBM products, we have the capability of leveraging them, and part of our practice is to take our clients through the journey, very specifically mapping out the approach for each client. We don't have a niche solution, but rather we are true partners, much like we find with the IBM portfolio of products. We are true partners in leveraging only those which are relevant, applicable, and can add a progressive value. A lot of times, we want to give them the leadership but we base that upon rock-solid capabilities of the delivery in the IBM portfolio.

As an example of the impact on a customer's ability to change or update processes, one customer, in particular, wanted to link the front-end through the enterprise. The BPM solution frameworks that we were able to provide them through the IBM portfolio, they have enabled them to lock in from the back-end processes through the middleware to the front-end, so they can go to market and sell their company.

It has a mature delivery already spec'd out with almost global applicability through IBM's many customers, and being able to put that on it. It helps maintain, and in many instances, lower costs, as well as to maintain those costs, keeping them stable. It mitigates a lot of the risk of scaling to the enterprise. It also gives the best possible customer experience for that particular client.

If you're trying to lower and contain your costs or mitigate a lot of risk, there is nothing like the IBM Cloud. It can take on the security and regulatory risks.

I would like to see a lot more case studies. 

I'd like to see a lot more of the partners who've adopted these solutions come forward and demonstrate themselves. We have done this in the past where we had our clients at the IBM Think events interconnect, come forward and say, "This is what we've done with Miracle and IBM," and make that presentation known. I'd like to see a lot more of that available on a case by case basis. 

I'd like to see a lot more of the partners come forward and talk about how various partners have assisted them rather than just this is what it is and this is what it can do. Nothing like kicking the tires after you've bought it. Understand where the value is.

The product has been well-orchestrated and proven. Through a lot of our own blood, sweat, and tears in terms of our frameworks, we've been able to validate them in every instance.

Because we try to understand the full enterprise, whether it's an SMB or a larger organization, we already have the scalability understood, and we've already taken a look at that architecture, we've taken a look at the delivery. The scalability is part of what we deliver as a company, in terms of the thought leadership, which is all hallmarked on the IBM product like that we're able to leverage.

Everything is complex. There's no easy-peasy. Intelligent process automation becomes a complex matter. Most people are terrified of moving from their on-prem into the automation and digital transformation. 

We often times will map out according to what we've done in the industry. There is nothing simple, everything is very focused on a true partnership with our customer base.

We demonstrate ROI even before we go on. We show it to our clients from our understanding of the business assessments, expectations, and objectives. We then transcribe that into our technical solution, in which we portray and show them the ROI, from the user base from day one. Then, they can understand what they will realize in terms of time and in terms of growth.

Competing solutions are SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle.

With IBM, you have only a few roadmaps, and I think that's the value of IBM.

Stay as close as you can to what the current business model is; don't try to reinvent or recreate it. Just because it has appeal on all the buzzwords and new technologies, stay with what you've currently done and utilize that in each incremental stage.

I always like to have an early start. I find early adopters to be amongst the best proponents. In every case, I would like to get in earlier.

I'd like to see a lot more partners come forward in the present. This is where IBM has stepped forward previously and helped me in our world.

It allows for model-driven development, easy to use drag and drop type configuration, integrations, reporting, etc.

The main business benefits, at the highest level, are to improve the customer experience and operational efficiency. Sometimes, you can't do one without the other. I am trying to improve how customers interact with organizations. These days, everybody has many channels through which they arrive. For example, even in this day and age, a lot of very large companies have siloed operations across channels, which leads to a disjointed customer experience.

We use it as a client workflow platform, because it is designed for improving client-facing and internal processes. There are other uses for the platform: rapid application development, low code development, and high performance application.

As soon as you go live, you have a bunch of changes right on the back of it. Those changes will go live in two to four weeks. It will continue to keep up with the changing needs of the business. That is the strong value proposition of BPM. It's not a one-time automation.

The user experience, while it has improved, should continue to improve. It should stay on that trajectory. These days, we are all spoiled by applications, like Amazon and Facebook, and stuff we are using in our day-to-day lives. We expect the same experience from enterprise applications as we do from consumer applications. Some of the companies which are leading the charge have minimized the gap of customer experience from consumer to enterprise. IBM and its BPM platform is moving in this direction. It still need to improve, but it's getting there.

It is very stable right now. We have seen nothing but amazing results over the last six years.

I have yet to come across a use case where scalability was an issue. 

We don't use their support. We have our own IBM experts who are certified and have years of experience.

The initial setup is very quick. 

Most of our projects take about three people and are done in three months.

BPM is good when used for the right use cases. I will not use BPM for a trading desk that's making split-second decisions because that is not the right use case for it. When you use it for the right use cases (e.g., a loan origination process for a bank, claims processing for an insurance company, or a healthcare provider accepting a claim and settling it), processes which typically range from hours to weeks, then when you apply BPM, you bring the processes down by an order of magnitude to minutes to hours, respectively. Those are the right use cases for BPM. There's no performance issue if you use it the right way. 

Our customer continue to use the product over time, which is the best indicator that they are seeing ROI from the product. 

It has a low cost to implement. You'll get your money back in the same year that you complete the project. 

One of its competitors is Appium.

If you're not leveraging these types of technologies, you're missing out.

The power to understand and automate processes. 

It allows the business to make changes going forward. It gives them a bit more power and accountability for some of their processes.

The business would like to use the product with a lot less IT and equipment involvement.

Initially, we were using the cloud solution for BPM. As we keep building up the versions, it has become a better solution for us. There were some things we stumbled stumbled upon that we would have expected a bit more advanced information from IBM, but we are now more informed.

We are going to try out a hybrid solution: on-premise and cloud. So, we will see in the future about how scalable it is.

We were building isolated solutions using SharePoint or other tool. So, it seemed to make a bit more sense to say, “Can we use something that's more of an industry standard tool to utilize?"

The initial setup was straightforward, especially on the cloud.

We used an IBM partner for installation.

A good portion of our customers are in the financial services industry, so back office processing related to financial services.

The main benefits would be getting previously undocumented processes under control, improving efficiency, eliminating redundant work, and a few of them being able to achieve some sort of compliance requirement.

Our customers use the solution as a workflow platform to manage their processes. They typically model processes with human and system activities. Then, they use the workflow engine to coordinate those activities making sure work progresses, providing visibility metrics and tracking.

With a regional bank, they used it to update some of their back-end processes for their credit division. It definitely enabled them to change their processes and become more efficient.

We have used it in conjunction with operational decision manager, in several cases.

• Visualizing the process.
• Quickly build a solution.

Better integration with other products in the automation suite; easier to integrate with IBM's Operational Decision Manager and content management system.

It is stable.

Scalability is very good provided you bear it in mind during implementation phase. It's possible to do bad things that will affect you later with scalability.

The initial setup is fairly complex. Luckily, we have a few people in our company that know how to do it. It is just a question of having the right resources.

We implemented the solution at the right time for our company and customers.

Our customers do see ROI. They'll identify some particularly painful or uncoordinated processes to start with, then build out from there, picking off low hanging fruit.

We are purely IBM. However, we do run into Pega BPM when we are evaluating BPM solutions.

I would recommend IBM BPM.

It comes down to the speed of implementation: How fast can we build something which our customers can use in their business and run with.

Our customers use it as a workflow management platform for processes. We have a wide range of customers in terms of the types of processes. We've worked with a couple of the very large accounting firms on, for example, tax calculations for commercial clients. Think of it as TurboTax, but for commercial customers.

We also have onboarding use cases - every BPM product out there just supports onboarding. We have several of those types of use cases as well.

The vision of what BPM can bring to our clients to be able to manage workflow quickly, efficiently, and to get visibility, that's what the IBM suite provides us.

Agility is the key. It gives our customers a faster way to be able to implement processes, get ownership of task, visibility into a process. The ability to modify that process, optimize that process over time, is probably the biggest benefit that they get from the software.

It gives us, as a partner, a lot of options for building on additional capabilities that we see customers asking for time and time again. It's a very open model for adding in toolkits or functionality on top of the overall BPM platform.

BPM has always had this challenge: It had this promise to enable non-technical users, business people. That is an area where we, as a business partner, and other business partners, continue to build new tools that sit on top of BPM, to push that level of engagement further and further out to the business side. That's an area that still needs to be improved.

Also, we would like to see integration with artificial intelligence, machine learning-type of technical capabilities. Right now, there are a lot Watson libraries out there. Building those integrations more, out-of-the-box, from IBM would be a good direction.

It is a consistently stable product. IBM BPM has come a long way from its original Lombardi days, to coming into IBM and the rewriting of the overall framework, to the way the UIs work. Where it is today, it's quite an enterprise-level product.

We use it across the board for what IBM labels smaller clients, commercial clients, all the way to enterprise clients. It's like any software package. Scalability is built into it, but it doesn't always come automatically. There is a lot of expertise that we use in performance-tuning it. There are times when, if you have a tremendous number of API calls, there's some tweaking that should happen to optimize that. But it's all configurable. There are things that you can tune to make it enterprise-capable, based on your use case.

Tech support is an area that could be improved. What we've seen over the years is that they had better support in the past than they do now. They're a little slower to respond; that could be based on the resources that are available to IBM.

Setup is a little more complex. But with the support of platforms on cloud, we love that, our customers love it. This becomes so much easier. We provision an environment and now we start building business processes or the application immediately. We don't worry about configuration.

Installation for on-prem used to be a one-time activity for engagement. And we may not even mentor a customer on that, because all they really care about is building processes. With the cloud, it becomes just a push of a button to provision it.

We are using it to automate specific processes in cooperation with robotic process automation. We have some manual tasks that we want to automate and are using this to link different tasks under one process.

IBM BPM and Automation Anywhere working together automate manual tasks with a reduction in FTEs, creating about a 30% reduction in FTEs by automating processes. Part of the benefit is due to the automated execution and the other part is due to linking tasks and their specific processes.

The integration with the robotic process automation tool that we are using. We are using Automation Anywhere tool, as it appears that the two product integrate quite well together. It was actually the reason we chose them.

I would like it more documentation during the design phase.

We would appreciate more user-friendly definitions of processes with a more user-friendly interface for documenting processes. Also, the ability to produce process documentation automatically in a readable manner.

It appears to be quite stable.

We haven't actually stressed it because we do small processes.

We did not switch solutions. We chose to purchase IBM BPM because it was bundled with the actual RPA program/solution that we decided to purchase. We decided to use Automation Anywhere tool (RPA), and it is was bundled with IBM BPM.

The initial setup was quite straightforward.

We needed about a week of assistance from the vendor.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Price
• Sales support
• All the technical requirements or functional requirements of the product.