Nintex offers a platform that helps companies discover, automate, and optimize business processes.
$480
Minimum 1,000 users per user
OpenText Solutions Business Manager
Score 5.7 out of 10
N/A
OpenText™ Solutions Business Manager, formerly from Micro Focus is enterprise-scale business process automation software. It helps IT quickly create, adapt, deploy, and govern process-based apps and workflows for humans and systems across the organization.
Nintex is best suited when processes are drawed by the business and then can be furter enhanced by IT professionals. When only used by business units we see that there are some lose ends in processes and some bagic process knowledge is needed. Therefore it is wise that the persons in the business who will use Nintex have some basic knowledge on how to set up business processes
How many users will be using the system? What part of the organization will own the product? Serena is a great workflow tool. It can be tailored to fit in any scenario and so I dont believe there is any situation where it would be inappropriate.
One of my favorite capabilities within the Serena user interface is the reporting. Detailed searches into the workflows allow the users to create reports containing any field that is in the workflow. Users here use the reporting during review time to pull metrics on tickets they have worked during the year. From a process perspective, the system provides a specific report with details around how long the items have been in various states. I use this information to measure my process peformance and to identify bottlenecks within the processes themselves. The reports are fairly easy to use but they can also be very complex too. Reports can be set up and shared across groups. Generic reports can also be set up so that query at run time fields can be entered.
Developing new processes in Serena Business Manager is relatively easy and does not necessarily need to be done by a developer. Serena has added some key features that reduces the need to add Java scripts. Serena Business Manager is a blank slate and it can be as complex or as simple as you make it. The forms are the same. I have seen some very simple designs and some very complex and beautiful form designs.
From a user perspective, it is fairly simple to just pick up and start using. I introduce our new hires to the systems in a thirty minute session. Most users are more confused by which process to use for what than by how to use the system.
Adding Machine learning features like the "Image and Text Automation" component, which allows bots to extract data from unstructured sources like scanned documents or PDFs.
Natural language processing (NLP) features to understand and interpret human language, which can be useful for tasks like customer service or data entry. mostly for middle east countries where Arabic language is used.
Integration with external systems where many industries uses their own legacy systems and they need RPA bot to interact with their systems as well.
Adding More OCR tools for Document data extraction and dynamic content.
Serena's documentation for the product is well written but it can be a bit challenging because it is often missing key components, best practices or tips and tricks that you get when you call into their customer support. It is also very frustrating to have their release notes refer back to their knowledge base to have their customers figure out what they fixed in their releases.
Serena Business Manager manages their users in an Administrator function. Any changes made in this part of Serena is only logged in the database. It would be nice to have some reporting out of of this system. When you have multiple administrators of a system, it would be a nice feature to have some reporting here rather than having to go into the database.
The notification feature within Serena can be a bit challenging and time consuming. You can't copy the notifications so if you want to duplicate a notification you had previously created you have to recreate it again. The notifications have three levels to them and they can be a bit tricky to get them to work just right.
We are currently investigating which collaboration platform best suits our needs. Chances are that we move to SharePoint Online and then we're going to also consider the microsoft power platform (power automate and power apps) to develop forms and workflows. Aspecially the pricing model for the cloud is currently a blocking factor to go for the Nintex solution in the Cloud.
Based on the on-prem experience with this tool, I believe that they have a lot of potential to help the online version catch up to where the on-prem left off. Nintex developed their online version and it is not as fully formed or capable compared to the on-prem version, and the licensing model scales back what we would have liked to be an expansion or at least continuous improvement of existing flows. It is also not near as user friendly specifically to non-developers and has an uncanny similarity to Microsoft Flow in the online instance. Consistent with my reviews of the tool - I believe they have some good approaches to design thinking that, if translated well from on-prem to online, could make this a clear winner again.
The Nintex Process Platform has never crashed or had any availability issues during my usage. However there was an issue that was of my own making that caused a slowdown of the system. I had set up a process to run once a day and check for employees on a list that had certain parameters selected, and for some reason that I had to troubleshoot, the process instead ran constantly, which filled the cache quickly. I ended up having to dismantle that process so the system didn't crash.
Unlike any other process automation product out there. Not only is it a low-code, easy to use tool for building processes in environments like SharePoint or Salesforce, they have really started to expand their tool-set by offering tools to manage other things like process mapping, RPA, mobile,etc.
The support team works as fast as they can and they are usually fast to solver the issues. Sometimes they need more time to solve one of them because our workflows and so on are more complex than usual clients.
I used the Nintex training software, it was easy to watch and follow along. It didn't go too fast and was descriptive enough to understand what the steps needed were in order to produce efficient workflows and user friendly forms.
1.Start with Simple Workflows: Begin with basic workflows to gain user confidence before tackling complex processes. 2.Involve Stakeholders Early: Engage business users and IT early to align workflows with real business needs. 3.Comprehensive Training: Invest in user training to ensure smooth adoption and reduce resistance. 4.Leverage Prebuilt Templates: Use Nintex’s templates to speed up implementation and maintain consistency. 5.Iterate and Optimize: Continuously improve workflows based on user feedback and performance metrics.
It's much more reasonably priced and we were able to actually experience the platform for a bit before we made a decision. And by the time our demo was finished we had already started depending on it for some of our processes so it would've been very hard to separate from it
We have been using Serena for eight years and I don't believe I can answer this question since it was so long ago that we made the decision to purchase Serena.
The scalability is really bottlenecked by the imagination of the user. I was able to make processes for my own personal usage, making my daily tasks easier. I was also able to make processes that affected hundreds of employees, making large standardization and efficiency gains. So either way, the system is used the same way, and I was the limiting factor.
We have saved our company thousands of dollars by creating our own customer support system rather than using a 3rd party tool.
The ability to generate documents/PDFs in workflows has solved a great number of process issues for us and groups who had previously been using paper documents.
Automating many permissions updates through workflows has been a huge time saver for repetitive processes.
We use Serena to standardize our business processes to ensure a more efficient work day experience for our employees. By having the employees use Serena for the processes we can ensure the process is completed the same way every time.
By having our key processes in Serena we are able to measure our processes at any time. Some of those key metrics include a 90% reduction in rework and a 47% reduction in overall process time. With the ability to measure processes at any time, we can react to process problems and correct them quickly. Serena Business Manager is flexible enough to allow quick development and rapid promotion when necessary.
Serena is very ingrained in our culture and the culture has taken on the "ticket" mentality unfortunately. With everyone trying to measure their work and justify their body counts through ticket counts, having a ticket opened for every act of work has become the standard.
