Overall a good BPM engine, but use it for what it's meant to be
March 17, 2014
Overall a good BPM engine, but use it for what it's meant to be
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
8.5
Overall Satisfaction
IBM Business Process Manager is used at our company to standardize, automate, and measure business processes. It is envisioned that the whole organization will use BPM. It will standardize business processes because optimal processes will be designed and implemented in BPM. There will not be a lot of room for variation. Manual processes like mailing forms will be automated. We will be able to monitor and measure processes through BPM's built in reporting.
- BPMN diagrams are somewhat easy to read and comprehend for non-technical business users.
- BPM Coaches allow developers to rapidly develop simple User Interfaces.
- BPM allows developers to call basic SOA services easily.
- If you need to develop complex User Interfaces, they are very hard to implement using Coaches.
- If you need to call SOA Services that have complex data structures such as recursively nested objects and anyType objects, the built in service discovery and type generation does not support it and blows up.
- The Process Designer IDE tends to run very slow because of all the chatting it has to do with the server side Process Center.
- We are documenting our business processes using BPMN.
- We are forced to think deeply about our processes and optimize them as a result.
- We are getting rid of manual processes such as mailing paper forms.
- We can monitor our processes and improve them constantly.
BPM was purchased together with other products from IBM's InfoSphere and WebSphere offerings before I came here. I have personally worked with alternatives at a previous jobs. I have developed workflows using SharePoint. I have developed workflows using Documentum's workflow engine. I have also worked on an in-house workflow engine. IBM BPM is the best BPM engine I have ever worked with.
Usability
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Creating a Coach UI
- Calling a simple Web Service
- Claiming and submitting a task
- Developing a complex UI
- Calling a complex Web Service
- Development can be slow because Process Designer IDE chats with server side Process Center a lot