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.
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Pipefy
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Pipefy headquartered in San Francisco offers their process management and workflow software providing processes for customer success, service desk, sales operations, and other 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.
Pipefy is very well suited if you have a team doing any sort of process... for real! It simplified everything from our sales and marketing objectives/processes, to our onboarding and accounting side of things. Since you can share different pipes with others, it's easy to see where others are at in the process and move the card along while keeping others informed. It makes sure you don't miss any information or steps along the way, which is great if your process is detail-oriented. It is a little less appropriate for marketing efforts, but we still try to use it to keep track of things in a central space. Definitely best suited for sales, technical things, and accounting.
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.
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.
Pipefy support is pretty good. There were a few instances where the agent didn't really understand what I was trying to get help with, but that was only once. Every other time it has been pretty fast and efficient. They are also very kind and understanding. I don't think they need much help in that dept
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.
We started using software we already had (such as Slack and Sheets) but this software is not actually ideal to manage processes, which led to errors, miscommunication, and execution problems. Trello is good for managing demand but offers no process customization or approval and Jira is too focused on development for our needs, and also hard to customize.
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.
Our processes are more organized and we are not missing any steps.
We are able to touch base with customers easier since we have all potential/missed clients in one pipe, with automated alerts (i.e. it has been 60 days since contact with this customer).
We are able to keep track of customer billing changes easier.
