BizFlow BPM Suite (also called BizFlow Plus BPM Suite) is a BPM platform offered by BizFlow (formerly HandySoft). Capabilities include process design and execution, case management, business rules, web application and form development, tasking and action tracking, ad-hoc reporting, and mobile access. The product can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud.
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Oracle BPM Suite
Score 8.6 out of 10
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The Oracle Business Process Management Suite is an integrated environment for developing, administering, and using business applications centered around business processes.
Although the tool was developed locally in South Korea, it is still a good tool and is already validated in a number of industries. The problem is, no one seems to know the future of the product. It is okay to use it as a pilot tool for any non-commercial purpose, but to be used in a professional or enterprise setting, maintenance, licensing, and other things need to be guaranteed by HandySoft.
Oracle BPM is well suited to organizations and environments that have a good understanding of their business processes and organizational structures. Trying to introduce a tool such as Oracle BPM into the organization without a good grasp on how the business operates is a recipe for disaster as the implementation will uncover all of the dirty secrets of an organizations business processes and bring them to light. BPM is not to be utilized for smaller service orchestrations or technical service implementations, these should be handled by the Oracle SOA Suite using the BPEL process manager, leaving BPM to handle the organizational business processes, referring to and including lower level services and BPEL processes as needed.
BizFlow has a long history of development and implementation in a variety of industries. Its modeling tool is well-designed and user-friendly.
BizFlow supports seamless integration with backend services like MySQL databases and web services. Since it is an enterprise-wide BPM tool, system performance was stable and robust.
It supports modern m-health requirements, with social BPM functions and mobile support. Mobile integration especially was good, with the provider's secure messaging functions.
It's not even clear that BizFlow is still managed by the company. It was a good tool before, but it looks like it's been fading out.
Although this was an R&D project in an academic institute, business support was extremely poor. We had no idea how to resolve issues; there were no online communities, documentation, or anyone who knew this product.
Few references in healthcare and clinical settings. We tried this for a proof-of-concept though, so it didn't matter.
Oracle BPM is left behind by other tools more modern in terms of user experience, usability and ability to integrate with everything else.
To really harvest the potential of Oracle BPM you need to do it in JDeveloper and with ADF. This restricts its usage to very technical people.
The administration of the Oracle BPM tools has really put a burden on our team. It is running on Weblogic and we experience issues very often either with performance or with a bad configuration of the system.
As with all Oracle products, the price can be an issue for smaller shops.
At the beginning of the project, we considered popular tools for the modeling and execution of business processes: jBPM, Activity, Tibco, etc. jBPM is the tool we liked because of its strong support of BPMN 2.0 and strong online community and support. We had different expectations for BizFlow, like professional and business supports. In the end, although haven't decided yet, most likely we will move forward with jBPM instead of BizFlow. Unless things change, the tool will fade out from the market silently.
We evaluated Bonita and found that it might fit a smaller-sized company better; we found that Oracle BPM Suite scaled much more evenly. We almost went with one of the competitors, but in the end chose Oracle BPM Suite after we factored in the cost of VMware licensing. There are literally tons of analytics on the back end which are great for upper management, but not so much for average users, but this fits our business model quite well.
We ended up deciding to not use BizFlow for future projects. The main reason wasn't due to ROI or cost, but was due to our uncertainty of the management and future direction of the tool by the company.
Besides the business issue, as far as reasonably priced software goes, it is a good tool.
Adopting BizFlow into a healthcare industry may come with additional expense due to its lack of references in the industry, which should be additionally considered.
You'll most certainly need a deep dive and extensive training before your users can even think of using the product and they are very expensive.
Lack of documentation makes it very difficult to manage the application if any error is encountered which will result in you ending up hiring a dedicated person to look into the application once it's deployed.
For a very large org., if properly implemented and used, it can help identify the cost-intensive and inefficient processes.
