Oracle BPM Suite vs. Smartwaiver

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.

Smartwaiver is well suited for activities where the client can check in before the activity and pre sign a waiver. This speeds the actual check in process and allows everyone to get out having fun instead of dealing with paperwork. If the activity is complex then the waiver is well suited to screen out candidates that do not meet the fitness level OR require them to get a doctor's note.

Incentivized

• Oracle BPM [Suite] can support unlimited number of cases. No limitations in cases raised.
• Oracle Weblogic can handle multiple traffic. [It] can handle lots of heavy load[s].
• Oracle BPM has extensive integration with database[s]. Huge number[s] of customization can be created.

Incentivized

• integrates with our reservation system. We can connect Fareharbor and assign waivers to each group and they populate in the reservation.
• Smartwaiver collects each guests email address and populates it into our Fareharbor system allowing us to connect w/ each guest that joined us not just the guest who set up the reservation
• Waiver searching is very simple with Smartwaiver. We can search by name or email and the guests information pulls up for quick search.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Limit to some fields.
• The YouTube embedding requires you to call support.
• Requires an internet connection (sometimes the wifi would go out).

Incentivized

In many scenarios it should have provided more features. It took a lot of effort while debugging, making it difficult to maintain.

Not easy to debug errors.

Overall satisfactory

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.

Incentivized

I've been approached by a couple other companies, the most recent would be Wherewolf. They reached out, but sadly they require only an ipad to use their system which isn't possible for us since we purchased simple tablets. They have a bit more complexity with utilizing the guest's information after the tour, but I think that's something Smartwaiver will move to eventually.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Smartwaiver costs about the same as a paper waiver but allows look up of information via search - this alone is worth the investment.

Incentivized