Control-M from BMC is a platform for integrating, automating, and orchestrating application and data workflows in production across complex hybrid technology ecosystems. It provides deep operational capabilities, delivering speed, scale, security, and governance.
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Kissflow
Score 6.3 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
KiSSFLOW is a cloud-based business process management and workflow management software designed to enable users to create an unlimited number of automated business applications with a through a simple user interface.
Control-M is a reliable and well-developed product with excellent vendor support that updates and expands the software often and offers a cloud-based deployment choice. When there are many Batch processes in IT operations that need to be monitored and controlled to ensure IT services, Control-M is ideally suited for centralized workload automation and task management.
Workflow. I would absolutely, 100% recommend it for a school, in Admissions, and I would recommend it to any small company who has an issue with workflow. The best thing about the program is that it knows what it is, and knows what it wants to be. You aren't going to sit down to work with KiSSFLOW and end up being sold an HR program. To make it work just right, find the person who truly understands how your business works. Have them build a workflow which takes care of the tedious tasks, and then let them train others on the process. You will find that your productivity increases, and that your paper costs decrease.
Control-M provides a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes in the organization. Nothing is hidden or left unattended in a timely manner.
The proper use of the BIM component has allowed the change of paradigm in the operation, adopting a proactive management instead of the typical reactive management in the event of production failures.
The use of Forecast and production simulations allows you to identify bottlenecks and focus first on managing those failures that have the greatest impact on production SLAs.
Control-M/Change Manager has arrived to shorten development cycles from requirements gathering to production testing. It has been a utility that monetizes the development of Jobs meshes.
The GUI is capable of efficiently handling more than 80,000 jobs per day. This is certainly a challenge in designing a good user experience. I don't know if there is a reasonable limit to this. One of my clients runs more than 80,000 Jobs daily and the GUI remains smooth all the time.
Job-As-Code is a DevOps accelerator that has just begun to be adopted. Its implementation will make workload management even more cost-effective.
Ease of Use: It's easier to use and see workflow tasks that are assigned to you, workflows that you've participated in, or workflows that are pending other peoples approvals. From a development side, it's easy to pick up and begin creating processes if you know Excel formulation, which is easily researched as well.
Ease of Access: Since KiSSFLOW is hosted in the cloud, you can access the site from any internet connected device. All you have to do is sign in with your account, as opposed to needing to be on the network to access like our previous system.
The App: This is a feature we really hope to get a lot of use out of. With the way our business is structured, there are a lot of Regional positions that are always on the go. Because our current system requires a user to be on the network to access, this makes it hard for these roles to respond to tasks, causing bottlenecks. With an app available, along with push notifications, we can keep these tasks responses on pace with the associates required in that task.
As with most of the mainframe software products, documentation seems to be the weak link for the products - written by people and for people who already know what they need to do, not for people who are trying to figure how to use the product.
We are a large JES3 mainframe shop. As with all vendors who still provide software for mainframe systems, software is generally designed and developed for JES2 and is frequently not fully tested in a JES3 environment before being shipped out.
The reporting could use some improvement. The actual reports are OK, it is access to the reports that is the problem. This is related to the permission schema. It really just has user, admin, and nothing in-between. There really needs to be something like report admin or something. Excel exports for data are needed as well.
The user workflow selection UI is not the best. There is a big red + sign in the lower right of the browser window that is not labeled. That is not clear. Also the selection list is just a pop-up window, it really should be a full page.
The mobile app does not have all the features that the browser version has, especially admin tools.
It is a great product plain and simple. We've had Control-M for 20+ years and the support that BMC Software provides is really second to none. There is always a situation that someone can think of where I have to say, "No we can't do that", however I'm confident that we've been able to meet and most of the time exceed our end user expectations with what the product can offer them.
Control-M's overall usability is very good because it is simple to use. Control-M SelfService is an easy tool to give to some of the users who want to use a web interface. The training curve for most users is very short and most of the functions are very simple to figure out.
Although the product is very stable there have been a few incidents when I needed support. I have worked with technicians from all around the globe because of the rolling support. This gives me the quickest support when I need it most in those early hours of the morning. The technicians I have worked with have been very knowledgeable and if necessary got help when needed.
I haven't encountered a need for support with KiSSFLOW. It's not a perfect platform, but it's functional, dependable, and reasonably intuitive. I can't fault a support team just because their product works!
We last reviewed the market in 2001 (schedulers are long-term commitments!) and Control-M edged (by a very narrow margin) the Tivoli alternative, with Dollar Universe (now part of Automic) back in third place. We also tested the Tidal Software scheduler (now part of Cisco) but I cannot see that listed here. Control-M won out through reliability and cross-platform support. Since we made our choice it has become clear that Control-M has moved ahead of the alternatives.
KiSSFLOW is much easier to set up, less coding and easier to explain to those that are being trained. The company already had SharePoint, but it is a very difficult system to set up. A class had to be taken, along with getting books in order to understand the process of the workflow. With KiSSFLOW, it is simple to understand, the helpdesk is quick with their response, help topics are laid out simply and you can even talk with someone on that side to ask your questions. Overall, KiSSFLOW is a much easier workflow and system to use.
I would expect this product to give a positive return on investment. Running jobs in cron for example would require a lot more scripting effort to ensure that the proper notifications are done on failures. With the built in functionality in Control-M the effort would be greatly reduced
