Oracle BPM Suite vs. Mitratech TAP Workflow Automation

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.

From my few months of using the tool, I believe the tool would be best suited for Legal Ops (Contracting) & Procurement. Maybe even in competitive bidding (strategic sourcing: eg RFP & RFX). The tool may be less appropriate for Payment Processing/Collecting.

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

• Creating a user community and sharing knowledge of automation best practices.
• Easy to use form and workflow builder.
• Responsive and knowledgeable technical team.

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

• Adding form fields can be quite tedious as it has to be added to every stage/relationship.
• It's difficult to remember where a certain condition/formula sits.
• I wish the workflow itself can be exported for presentation/demo/documentation purposes.
• I wish there was a way for more than one admin to configure the tool at the same time.

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

Autodesk selected TAP because of its ability to handle more complex workflows. We vetted a lot of "light" automation solutions but wanted a tool that was flexible enough to handle our more extensive use cases.

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

• Required fields force robust disclosure information up front.
• Workday integration enables pre-population of fields which reduces manual entry and saves compliance time.
• Emails, communications, and disclosure decision memos and stored in a centralized database which helps our team keep compliant records.
• Automated reminders have led to less ‘chasing’ by compliance.
• Improved UX has encouraged and increased disclosures, mitigating our company's risk.

Incentivized