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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TIBCO iProcess (discontinued)
Score 7.1 out of 10
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TIBCO iProcess is a BPM product, integrated with its SOA platform (BusinessWorks and ActiveMatrix), which allows it to handle both human-centric and integration-centric processes in a single platform. The product is no longer available for sale.
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.
iProcess is a perfect BPM tool that has been able to solve complex business problems and situations, but with time newer and easier to use tools have also been developed by competing companies and thus this tool needs to evolve with the competition. Newer and more easy to use tools are also available from TIBCO as well such as AMX BPM.
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.
It integrates all the BPM principles along with the great user interface and independent modules and engines. All the modules are separate and stand alone and thus provides easier understanding and ease of support.
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.
iProcess is a previous generation product, it lacks OSGi and cloud so it is seen as "old". Due to this, it is difficult to choose new installations. All other options seem shiny in comparison. But regarding performance and stability, it is still unsurpassed.
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.
Numbers are difficult to crunch, the best impact is that you always know the status of a single business case and the system runs fast and smoothly; your users will forget what waiting is.
Case tracking is perfectly accurate, having that you can extract statistical data and predict and optimize your business very accurately.
TIBCO iProcess administrators must be quite skilled; that increases your overall costs so the ROI will be delayed a bit.
