IBM Business Automation Workflow is a solution that helps users automate digital workflows to increase productivity, efficiency and insights — on premises or on cloud.
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Kissflow
Score 6.4 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.
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.htmlKnow the difference between process data and business datahttp://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2011/05/lombardi-best-practices.htmlhttp://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2012/02/bpm-system-architecture.html
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
• 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
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.
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!
• 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.
• 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)
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.
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.
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
