IBM Business Automation Workflow vs. Square 9 Softworks

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

Great for automating invoice processing where you want to set it and forget it. Also works well for document storage where you need things organized and easy to find. If you have complex requirements and need flexibility, this platform can handle it.
Not ideal if you expect a lot of exceptions or manual intervention since troubleshooting misrouted documents can be tricky. Also not the best fit if you want something that works out of the box with zero setup. You get the most out of it when you invest time upfront to build workflows.

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

• The software is very flexible, and the technicians were great at implementing our customizations for the PO project.
• While indexing fields in Global Search, the Key Free tool works great.
• Global Search is well-organized. It's easy to navigate and find your documents.
• The process for completing your project was well done. Communicating with individuals at Square 9 who were responsible for different aspects of the project was easy.

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

• GlobalSearch could use some enhancements in layout - THIS IS FIXED WITH THE NEWEST VERSION OF GLOBALSEARCH 6.3 and their Sleek GUI GlobalSearch GO! - WELL DONE!
• GlobalSearch could use external sharing of documents THIS IS FIXED WITH THE NEWEST VERSION OF GLOBALSEARCH 6.3 and their Sleek GUI GlobalSearch GO! - WELL DONE!
• GlobalForms could have better formatting tools to enhance the fields and text formatting

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.

We absolutely can't imagine not continuing software maintenance as there are always new additions that improve the system not to mention the excellent tech support when issues are encountered. Response times for troubleshooting are very quick and usually, my issue is resolved in less than an hour after connecting with support.

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

The items I am searching for are easily found. They are found in at least 95% of the searches. The failure rate generally is related to another employees user error or a template error set up by our Square 9 team in house.

Incentivized

Square-9 can get this product out to you in almost the same hour your order it. We got ours very fast.

With the PDF projected viewer, the document retrieval-to-display can drag for a second more than some systems, and the capture workflow if you overload a server array can also drag, but those are the only two issues we've ever seen with this product, and they are not serious issues at all.

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

We had one "production down" incident that took about a day to get help on. I think that's a bit too long. The support people seem confident but not that friendly. I feel like I'm bothering them when I get help, but they get the job done.

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.

It would have been higher, but the training is a bit muted for the lesser qualified office equipment vendors who signed up as partners to sell and support it. The more experienced ECM vendors and customer end-users will find the training very good, but a bit slow.

• 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)

I think the implementation could have gone a little smoother than it did. Now that I know how to use the software, I could do it myself. I feel that as an organization, we could have been a little better prepared. If the consultant was more aware of what we were looking for, they could have assisted in setting up some workflows for us as per the contract. But because we were not prepared, the initial implementation process was a little painful. That said, adding a document management system to ANY business kinda means everyone has to re-think the way they do their work which can be difficult for some staff.

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.

Laserfiche could not even complete their installation. Square 9 Softworks was able to come in and rescue the failed project. We have hardly scratched the surface of what we believe we can do in terms of more implementations of the Square 9 Softworks program in other business processes in our company. Square 9 Softworks was demonstrated to our procurement management team while they were struggling with the Laserfiche implementation, and they were ready to abandon Laserfiche immediately upon seeing the Square 9 Softworks program demonstrated. We abandoned Laserfiche even though we had financial investments with them already. This is testimony to how clearly Square 9 Softworks is a better solution than Laserfiche.

Incentivized

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

The scale-ability is quite good actually, but you need competent sales/support folks providing it to you, so the scale is set right for the demands of your system use. Some resellers are not good at doing this, some are fantastic. If you are scaled correctly at first implementation, you'll be very happy with this system.

• 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

• Having less paper in the office has saved space and supplies. We no longer need to purchase those expensive cardboard folders for archiving.
• Having someone do their own health screening is safer and saves us from keeping a staff member devoted to that task.
• I used to have to spend hours physically culling archive records. Now I can sort it and weed it with clicks of a button!

Incentivized