IBM BPM Reviews

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.

We use it for the approval of mortgage insurance. 

It has reduced a lot of manual errors and processes. 

The process flow. The BPM workflow that we use goes through the underwriting, approval from the managers, then it needs the loan approval.

We would like better performance and more visibility on each step of the tool.

It is pretty stable. Sometimes we have performance issues. Otherwise, it is good.

We have two nodes in the cluster environment. This is the scalability that we do have. If we need to increase it, we can add a node to the cluster.

The technical support was helpful when I used them.

In the beginning, we had an IBM BP3.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We worked with a business partner to implement.

It gives us a good return on investment.

It is a good product. I would recommend it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Support
• Pricing
• Licensing issues.

We are changing the major database in our financial sector. We moving to a paperless process and added a risk engine to make the decision for each loan. 

We use it to evaluate each loan. We have people doing the evaluation of each loan and use BPM to accelerate the process by having metrics between tracking points. We are use validation on the screens to avoid errors. 

We are also using ODM and Avast Enterprise Business services. 

• It controls the risk. 
• We reduced the PCL (credit losses).
• Its efficiency in reducing costs. 
• We are going from a paper to a paperless process.

In the future, we would like to reduce the resources used to manage the process. 

Controlling the operation. We have metrics about fraud, risks, etc. 

We like that it does not require a lot of hours to train our people. 

More customization. We like to customize the screens to show more things related to our company. Customization is very important for us; the complexity to build a solution. We need to make changes quickly, and sometimes the IBM team is very slow with the product evolution or changes to the tool. 

It is performing very well. We are building the solution right now and launching in August.

We are moving to this tool because we have more than 40,000 transactions a month, and we would like to triple this amount. 

Our next step is to scale and change the repayment process.

The technical support is very good. We are with an IBM partner.

We contact technical support because sometimes we have problems with our IBM servers failing. The support is always responsive in fixing the issue.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was complex. It is not always easy to launch a new platform and it needed better coordination with IBM.

We worked with a business partner to implement the solution. We worked with a business partner because they know how to implement solutions in each market. I am from Latin America, and this partner knows our market. Four years ago, I worked with IBM New York and it was difficult to apply these market solutions in Latin American. However, with this partner, they are aware of our market in Peru. 

Start with a PoC. Do small changes, then take a step back and grow with the platform.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Experience, teamwork, and resolution, because any project has its complications. We want a partner who will resolve these problems quickly. 

We use it for human resources and insurance companies, who use it for their recruitment processes. It has been performing well.

Our clients use it for recruitment. There is a big recruitment process for each department. When they recruit somebody, the IBM BPM solution has a work process:

• If he is commercial, rent him a car or a phone.

• If he is only technical, there is a process to have a desk or a laptop.

We use BPM in conjunction with IIB, IBM Integration Process.

• It provides value. 
• Reduces time.
• Simplifies processes.
• Names are correct during the recruitment process.

We need process monitoring. It is somewhat complex to monitor all the processes which work.

Stability is perfect.

Scalability is perfect.

We have not used IBM technical support.

Our clients were previously using Excel sheets for processes. It has changed their whole life as now the processes are all automated.

It is easier than WPS, which used to be the BPM product. IBM BPM is easier to implement, easier to deploy, and easier for the business people in the company to use the processes. 

We implement the solution on behalf of our clients.

Previously, there were human errors when they entered names. Sometimes, when they ordered a laptop for somebody, they ordered it two times because the first time the system did not acknowledge the order under the incorrect name. Then, they did not know it when through and received two laptops. They ended up having to return one of them, and this had a cost. 

This is why the product's ROI is so quick. 

We help our clients select three products, then afterwards we work with them to select a solution. Other than IBM, our clients often choose Bonitasoft, which is an open source product, and TIBCO BPM.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• A proof of concept
• Our certification of IBM products
• Our added value on these solutions
• Other customers' recommendations.

The product causes all the processes in the company to be centralized. It helps with process efficiency.

It makes the company business processes work more efficiently.

All our clients are changing to microservice and cloud service. However, BPM does not have a solution for microservice and cloud service.

It needs more integration for API management and cloud services. Also, it could maybe use a connection with microservices. 

BPM is very stable.

It is scalable.

I have not worked with IBM technical support for BPM.

I do the installation, configuration, and integration for my clients. It is usually a little complex.

As a bank, any business processes which run on it:

• A treasury application
• A lost and stolen credit card application
• New accounts, etc.

There are many use cases that are now administrated through one BPM processor.

It has performed pretty well. One of the concerns, which is a question of our processes more than the product, we like to do a monthly release cycle and that is not fast enough for some people. Therefore, we have created a separate BPM that we call our DevOps box, which allows them to update it anytime they want. This is in production.

We use it as a combination of machine processes and human processes. There is a workflow, then somebody kicks it off and enters the data. Some decisions are made automatically, and other decisions are made by human beings. Just the mix of these two makes it a good combination.

We are incorporating ODM to some degree.

We are creating a new box because we have all these forms. They have to be signed, therefore we have not been able to take advantage of the ease of deployment. However, we now have separate boxes, which do not need all the same approvals in order to get something into production. You can just put it in whenever you need to.

I like the Process Center. I can go to one place and view what all the environments are doing, the ease of deployment, etc.

Stability is good. We have had a few problems, but IBM has helped us to resolve them.

We had a weird problem that whenever the database would go down, even for a few seconds, it broke the connection. It would not come back up as it was supposed to. However, working with IBM, we were able to figure out a fix, then it came back up, even after an interruption of the database.

Scalability is good. In the time that I have been there, we have added more JVMs to help with the increased workload, so it does scale.

Technical support is good. They are very responsive. It is usually me who takes more time to get back to them than they take to get back to me, which is good.

We did use Oracle for a little while, but we did not like the Oracle BPM product.

IBM BPM allow us to streamline manually processes.

I have been involved in the setup of this new box (DevOps). I installed and configured it, but I did not do the original install. I did the new install, which was complex. However, the documentation is good, and we did it pretty much without incident.

We did the implementation directly with IBM.

Try it out on a small scale. Do one project which is relatively simple, then work out the bugs this way. Do not try to put too much in it at one time.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We are a bank, so security is extremely important. We are looking for someone who is going to be here a year from now, and someone who will support us. 

The number one thing is support. If we are down, we want somebody helping us now, because we can't be down.

Implementing and automating business workflows.

We use it for automating certain processes which previously took a lot of time for agents to set up different products for customers. They would have to enter a lot of different systems. This has now mostly been automated.

It is running okay, though we have experienced a little instability lately.

We have been experiencing bad performance and instability. 

We can scale by increasing the infrastructure which is currently running. 

We are receiving good assistance from the technical support.

We previously used the very early workflow engine from IBM. 

IBM BPM is a more modern tool than what we used before. 

The initial setup was a combination of straightforward and complex.

We implemented with IBM's help.

Contact IBM and let them help with the process.