IBM Business Automation Workflow vs. Redwood RunMyJobs

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

The automation of batch processing operations like file transfers, data backups, and report production is a good fit for Redwood Workload Automation. Organizations' IT operations can be streamlined and made more efficient because to its capacity to automate and schedule these procedures across a variety of platforms. Redwood Workload Automation is highly suited for automating complicated business operations within SAP settings and has a close interaction with SAP systems. Organizations may automate and streamline their SAP processes with the help of its ability to handle SAP tasks, spools, and workflows. Redwood Workload Automation excels at automating workloads on a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Unix, and other cloud environments. This makes it a viable option for businesses that need automation across numerous systems and have complex IT infrastructures. For large businesses with complicated IT environments, Redwood Workload Automation was created. It is the perfect option for enterprises with high-volume transaction processing requirements due to its scalability and capacity for handling large-scale workloads.

• 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

• SAP Batch Scheduling - This is THE BEST tool for triggering SAP jobs, bar none.
• User management- Other scheduling tools make it much more difficult to manage user access. Redwood user access management is a breeze and take less than half the time it take in other products.
• Scheduling Flexibility- The ease with which you can make custom time windows with Redwood is one of my favorite pluses. You can build as simple or as complex of a time window as you need to with Redwood.
• Support- The support that you get from Redwood is in my opinion the best in the world. I have dealt with all the big name players in IT and they all pale in comparison to Redwood. You will never feel like you are in it alone with the best support in the world right at your fingertips.

• 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

• A dashboard for checking the overall health of the tool
• Direct excel export option is unavailable to transport the jobs.
• Mobile notification is also helpful for those user who worked in 24*7 shift. if this option will available it is very useful for those user who needs to check system again and again

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.

Being in the cloud is a big help, with less hardware to maintain, the patches and updates are fast and easily done, we have built a good working relationship with Redwood.

• 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

The Redwood user interface is straightforward. The script can be used to renew the Redwood license by just copying the text from the. txt file from start to finish of license. The current page and the status of the work can both be refreshed automatically by setting a timer in Redwood. Redwood software's eye-catching features include online help through documentation and help support, which may be accessed by clicking the "I" button in the top right corner.

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

It seems many pressing issues have to be escalated to their dev team, which I believe is mostly overseas. The response time isn't always the greatest. I go back to the documentation as well, if that was better there would be less need of support from myself. There are also times when they figure out the resolution, it has to be included with a fix in which you have to wait for the next release, however long that may be. Update - the support response time and quality of answers has greatly increased in the past 6 months or more.

• 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.

Hi, We use redwood workload automation for scheduling jobs and for automatic alerts generation in case of long running and failed jobs. It provides easy access of managing jobs and controlling the flow of automation. Alerts generated keeps us up to date of the long running jobs as well as failed jobs. Configuring the jobs is easy and scheduling them through redwood makes it very effective for 24hours monitoring. The Redwood Support team is very helpful and gives prompt response and faster resolution when needed.

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

• 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

• Simple to install Redwood Workload Automation agent servers on every server side and trigger the necessary jobs in keeping with business needs.
• Allows for the interdependent scheduling of groups of Windows scripts and shell scripts.
• Many problems have been fixed, such as the ability to gather data on the number of activities that are executed each day, receive email notifications when a job expires, and connect system agents to monitors.
• capable of adhering to SLAs for complicated order flows

Incentivized