The Oracle Business Process Management Suite is an integrated environment for developing, administering, and using business applications centered around business processes.
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Salesforce
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Salesforce is a web-based CRM application that enables users to forecast revenues and track leads. It is a leading sales, service, and marketing app. Salesforce.com's Sales (CRM), Service, Platform and Marketing applications are designed to help companies connect with customers, partners, and employees in entirely new ways. According to the vendor, on average, reps using Salesforce see: a +29% increase in sales from greater visibility, +34% increase in sales productivity, and +42% increase in…
Oracle BPM is well suited to organizations and environments that have a good understanding of their business processes and organizational structures. Trying to introduce a tool such as Oracle BPM into the organization without a good grasp on how the business operates is a recipe for disaster as the implementation will uncover all of the dirty secrets of an organizations business processes and bring them to light. BPM is not to be utilized for smaller service orchestrations or technical service implementations, these should be handled by the Oracle SOA Suite using the BPEL process manager, leaving BPM to handle the organizational business processes, referring to and including lower level services and BPEL processes as needed.
Salesforce is so customizable that I can't think of situations where you couldn't configure the tool to do what you need. If Salesforce hasn't developed the capability itself, there is a marketplace where anyone else can develop and upload their solution for others to use as well. Also, due to Salesforce's success and size, almost every other app/software that you can think of has or is working on an integration with Salesforce. So if you need to use a different tool for a certain function, you can more likely than not still integrate it with Salesforce to enhance value.
Salesforce.com is extremely customizable. I would not consider it an out-of-the-box solution, although its standard fields allow for fundamental CRM activities and reporting.
Salesforce.com is able to integrate with 100s of third-party softwares—often times creating efficiencies in processes.
Reports within Salesforce.com have the ability to be simple as a standard Account report, or you can get very granular with your report filtering to segment a very specific result, eg. Accounts in California who are active clients and fall within the pharmaceutical industry and have a specified market capitalization.
Oracle BPM is left behind by other tools more modern in terms of user experience, usability and ability to integrate with everything else.
To really harvest the potential of Oracle BPM you need to do it in JDeveloper and with ADF. This restricts its usage to very technical people.
The administration of the Oracle BPM tools has really put a burden on our team. It is running on Weblogic and we experience issues very often either with performance or with a bad configuration of the system.
As with all Oracle products, the price can be an issue for smaller shops.
The Knowledge module can be improved. It is still limited compared to regular CMS. Still not possible to have a filter view per data categories
Using the Community portal also comes with a limited Community reply function that doesn´t allow text formatting. Very difficult to move staff away from emailing customers when this text box is very poor
Rigidity when you work in a big organization with same template. It needs to be a one fits all instance and the local needs are deprioritized because SF doesn´t allow customization
There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.
I'm a Millenial and more tech savvy, so learning this tool is more intuitive and I don't mind learning the ins and outs of the product. It can be cumbersome when permissions or new rules by our admins get enacted, that can cause disruptions in our workflows and annoyances. Overall, the usability is fine, and helps in my day to day more than causes disruptions
Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.
Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day." Points per Salesforce - 1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs. 2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers. 3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. 4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed. 5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale. 6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com. 7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements. 8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training. 9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure
The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.
I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.
I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business
I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.
We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this
Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.
We evaluated Bonita and found that it might fit a smaller-sized company better; we found that Oracle BPM Suite scaled much more evenly. We almost went with one of the competitors, but in the end chose Oracle BPM Suite after we factored in the cost of VMware licensing. There are literally tons of analytics on the back end which are great for upper management, but not so much for average users, but this fits our business model quite well.
I've used Act CRM by Xperience previously. Salesforce is way more robust and intuitive and meets the needs of an enterprise company with enterprise clients way more effectively. I don't think there is another CRM in the market with the overall functionality and usability that can complete with the Salesforce platform for someone in my role.
Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.
I've worked with Salesforce since 2001 in companies ranging from 4 to hundreds of sales people and the system has been able to scale and perhaps more importantly expand (functionally) to the needs of larger organizations. In fact in my previous company, as a provider of a solution that integrated with Salesforce, we had customers that had thousands of sales people using Salesforce.
Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.
You'll most certainly need a deep dive and extensive training before your users can even think of using the product and they are very expensive.
Lack of documentation makes it very difficult to manage the application if any error is encountered which will result in you ending up hiring a dedicated person to look into the application once it's deployed.
For a very large org., if properly implemented and used, it can help identify the cost-intensive and inefficient processes.
It requires a lot of time to manage but does a good job keeping everything in one place
Managers! Quit having sales professionals create spreadsheets and reports ad hoc. The information is in SFDC. Build a report so you can get it yourself.
If used properly and not restricted and overmanaged, SFDC will provide huge ROI
