Celonis vs. IBM Business Automation Workflow

Celonis is well suited especially for comparably big use cases due to hefty license costs. For thorough analyses, all departments should take part in the approach since there are a lot of hidden influences and effects from departments to one another. Use cases like conformance / revision are possible but will not be a big lever since this only involves checking single instances.

Incentivized

Have your process first on paper Its important to first document the process before venturing into BPMS. It will save a lot of pain and heartaches. A BPM tool is no magic bullet, it merely automates your process. Its upto you to put visibility and tracking on top of it. Provide monitoring so that you get a chance to improve your process continously. BPM is not an application If you are trying to build an application with BPM, chances are that your are alraedy failing. BPM must be a strategic initiative for an organization. Yes, you build Dashboards, Reports and other software in BPMS, however you do it at a process level not at an application level. http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2011/05/bpm-initiative.html Know the difference between process data and business data http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2011/05/lombardi-best-practices.html http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2012/02/bpm-system-architecture.html

• Clear understanding on how the processes really run
• Excellent solution to support use cases like harmonization, process excellence, audit and compliance
• High performing methodology to build economic value addressing inefficiencies
• Perfect to convince clients showing objective evidences
• Make easy the enterprise collaboration
• Provide an E2E "movie" of the processes
• Able to ensure a centric model to connect all the core processes
• Top performances that save time of the analyst that can spend energy in his real work
• Excellent ETL, agnostic (able to extrapolate data from many DB)
• Strong capabilities of the data model
• Continuous innovation
• Solid platform to address projects of business process reengineering

Incentivized

• System does a great job normalizing business process and automating order processing tasks. Before TeamWorks, the process was much more manual and more expensive staff ($65k to $70K) were required to manage the process. Since implementing TeamWorks, we need much lower-skilled workers to manage order processing.
• System ensures that we have consistent data across all systems.
• Rules engine is really the “company playbook” – it is the heart and soul of how the company works. It handles thousands of orders per day

• User interface is complex and so it can take some time for users who are new to process mining to become familiar with the tool
• Celonis is not able to integrate with all of Uniper's enterprise application due to lack of connectors
• No real-time collaboration with other users e.g. lack of shared annotations

Incentivized

• The system gets crashed when many instances go into the queue stage. The system even crashes and sometimes restarts automatically when the load on the server increases. We had to develop a separate software for this and maintain the same.
• We cannot manipulate the data during run time. It is difficult to develop user-interfaces with complex functionality.
• In order to consume external services that follow HTTP protocol, we need to use IDE for that, and consuming services from IDE takes a lot of time to give a response.

Incentivized

We have been able to leverage Celonis [greatly] because of the commitment and support we receive from our data scientist. I strongly believe that we would not be able to accomplish this without her assistance. Moreover, when we escalate matters, the product development is engaged and commits resources to make sure our initiatives/business cases are supported.

Incentivized

This particular decision will be made by other people. Overall IBM BPM is the best BPM engine that I have worked with. It is implemented at our company and IT and business are already somewhat familiar with it. Therefore if asked I will recommend renewal as long as the price is reasonable.

It is a great tool but also requires a lot of work to get it into a useable fashion. Part of this is on our end as we don't have the dedicated analyst function yet to really become self-sufficient with Celonis. It also uncovers a lot of data issues or at the very least, multiple rounds of development and data validation are required before getting to a position where the business users feel comfortable with the data being reflected. This is fairly normal with any data-related development effort and perhaps not unique to Celonis.

Incentivized

• The system is easy enough to use but, by definition, is a complex tool. However, they have done a good job generally balancing tool complexity / capability with usability. When comparing to MS Biz Talk, for example, Biz Talk has less functionality but is actually harder to use.
• Software is very flexible. For somebody with the right technical background, it’s quite easy to write some Java code to overcome any hurdles or make the product do what is needed

We submit tickets to Celonis through product support. No assistance is generally provided, have to wait and the ticket is then escalated to product support in Germany. Many times we submit the ticket and the support desk asks us the same questions back where they should already have this information.

Incentivized

Issues can be raised through tickets and it works based on the priority of the issue. The Support Team response is also good and the solution is provided in a short span of time. In a case where the issue is serious, they try to find out the root cause and provide an alternative for it.

Incentivized

• Attended on premise sysadmin training for 4 days, 8 hours per day. Although further follow-up training was available, I never felt the need to go back. Training was very hands-on with real modeling (rather than just following a manual). Very effective.

Celonis has a lot of tools to support the implementation.

• Very satisfied – not too difficult at all.
• We had a consultant available as part of our contract, but we didn’t really need to use (except for some advice on ActiveDirectory and single sign-on)

The major reason to choose Celonis is that it has enhanced decision-making in filtering the candidates. The frontend designer has nice graphics and has well-designed self-service. I particularly enjoy the visual editor, which allows you to create complicated PQL without having to write any code, as well as the numerous filtering choices, including process mining options.

Incentivized

Pega Pega is a comprehensive suite which offers a unique theme of BPM development in the market. A no-coding approach based on rules with inheritance makes Pega a very powerful product. However Pega, falls short on integration centric capabilities and very rigid to customize. On the other hand IBM comes with array of products which suits needs of varying degree. Advanced integration is solved by BPEL Process Server which has support for state based patterns and mediation. Dynamic rules and event management can be solved with WODM, Cloud to on-premise connectivity with Cast Iron, Enterprise gateway and security usecases with DataPower, Social BPM with IBM BPM , WODM, mobify with Worklight. Pega has a little bit of eveything here and there. It solves the dynamic rule management, brings out the flavor of Social BPM and mobility with Antenna ( I guess) and predictive analytics as well in one single suite. There are certain usecases which needs to have a little bit of everything, however this little bits and pieces of functionality when its blows, Pega would have problems to scale. With IBM its a bit nightmare to maintain a variety of technologies, however you can wish to go for one without the other and go for something only when you truly need it. Pega vs IBM Its difficult to pick a winner. In nutshell when you want a full scale BPM with rich integration capabilities go for IBM BPM. On the other hand if you hava mature integration capability already, Pega can yield quick results for you as well. Pega's strength is its methodology. IBM BPM's strength is integration. Actually you can't go wrong with both in terms of implementation. My strong recommendation is to invest time to process analysis and pick a good vendor to support consulting and implementation.

It scales from small team interactions to business processes serving thousands of employees, as well as straight-through-processing needs that go well beyond. Of course, scale is always in the eye of the beholder, but IBM BPM does a good job of giving you all of the hooks, APIs, and data that you need to take on whatever scaling approaches you need to meet the load

• Celonis thus far (and I do not anticipate anything changing) has not had a negative impact on our business. It has challenged us to think differently about what is possible and jumpstarted process improvement aimed at saving both money and time while improving the morale of our end users. Celonis has also provided us with enough data to be to develop targeted business objectives on system usage and timeliness which without them was nearly impossible to measure let alone act upon
• Better order processing (quicker, more system driven, and saves money)
• Reduction in throughput time (our order fulfillment time has improved and our order processing time has decreased)
• Finds and acts on automation opportunities
• Can find large dollar value opportunities for process improvement
• Can find data driven recommendations for executive interactions

• It has added value to the upper management to give visibility into what is happening at any time in the enterprise.
• Boosted employee morale because it gives them all the information to work the case/task in a single location.
• Identifies bottlenecks and improves the turnover.

Incentivized