Oracle BPM Suite vs. webMethods Business Process Management Suite (BPMS)

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.

Where webMethods Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) is well suited is for any use case where there is a business process that can executed over a long period of time (days rather than seconds) and that traverses multiple business applications and/or multiple lines of business and requires manual input from end users to approve or action specific steps. It is not well-suited for any business processes that can be distilled into a traditional integration solution between business applications that does not involve manual end user input, these types of uses cases will execute more efficiently on a traditional integration broker or enterprise service bus style solution.

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

• Great process design user interface and usability
• Excellent tools for monitoring processes at runtime
• Business rules can be managed and updated by non-technical resources

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

• Pricing is opaque and higher than we'd like
• Some of the user interfaces are outdated and looking their age
• Require buy in from business to achieve return on investment

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

We found webMethods Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) to be the most feature complete product in the BPM market when we evaluated it against other products available in the market. It provides the most features, the easiest to use process design and simulation tools, and the most efficient runtime process and rules engine. Just be aware that its pricing reflects this position in the market, but you get what you pay for.

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

• Initial adoption of BPMS was slow and required buy in from the business, which was only achieved through upper management buy in applying KPIs down the line
• Once a critical mass of business processes being automated with BPMS is reached, any processes that remain manual will stand out like a sore thumb and the business will be invested to automate those remaining processes too, so adoption of BPMS is like a slow snowball effect
• Not requiring technical resources such as developer to design and build out processes is a pipe dream and impossible to realise. You will always need experts in the automation tools you apply in your organisation, and webMethods BPMS is no exception

Incentivized