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IBM Business Automation Workflow

IBM Business Automation Workflow

Overview

What is IBM Business Automation Workflow?

IBM Business Automation Workflow is a solution that helps users automate digital workflows to increase productivity, efficiency and insights — on premises or on cloud.

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Learn from top reviewers

Kunal Jaipuriar's review

Rating: 10 out of 10
March 7, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
For business process automation developing business processes in BAW to increase time and efficiency. Specific to our experience we leveraged this in the banking and finance d...
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Verified user
Manager
IBM Business Automation Workflow1 year of experience

Good BPM tool with many features.

Rating: 8 out of 10
May 11, 2020
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
IBM BPM is used as middleware in our organization. It is used in the Banking and Finance sector of our organization. It allows us to customize the flow and we can even have a ...
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Verified user
Team Lead
IBM Business Automation Workflow3 years of experience

One of the pillars of the Digital Transformation, Business Process Manager

Rating: 9 out of 10
November 1, 2018
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
IBM Business Process Manager is being used by the entire organization for all aspects of our Origination processes, whether related to retail or companies. We also use it for ...
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Efrain Pereiro
Team Lead - Information Technology
Lider de proyectos
Banco Galicia
IBM Business Automation Workflow6 years of experience

IBM BPM Review

Rating: 8 out of 10
May 3, 2016
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Based on the client's requirements we propose solutions based on IBM Business Process Manager to give them process visibility and performance metrics. It also gives them idea ...
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Keshava Murthy B S
Employee - Information Technology
IBM Smarter Process Solution Architect
Perficient
IBM Business Automation Workflow5 years of experience

IBM BPM - the best commercial BPM software package

Rating: 10 out of 10
December 24, 2015
Vetted ReviewVerified User
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Scott Francis
C-Level Executive - Professional Services
Founder and Chief Technology Officer
BP3 Global, Inc.
IBM Business Automation Workflow10 years of experience
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Awards

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Pricing

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IBM Business Automation Workflow

IBM Business Automation Workflow

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What is IBM Business Automation Workflow?

IBM Business Automation Workflow is a solution that helps users automate digital workflows to increase productivity, efficiency and insights — on premises or on cloud.

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  • No setup fee

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  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

What is IBM Business Automation Workflow?

IBM Business Automation Workflow Video

Overview of Workplace from IBM Business Automation Workflow

IBM Business Automation Workflow Competitors

IBM Business Automation Workflow Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating Systems,
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

IBM Business Automation Workflow is a solution that helps users automate digital workflows to increase productivity, efficiency and insights — on premises or on cloud.

Appian, OpenText MBPM, and Oracle BPM Suite are common alternatives for IBM Business Automation Workflow.

Reviewers rate Dashboards and Standard reports and Custom reports highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of IBM Business Automation Workflow are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

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(1-5 of 6)

IBM BPM Review

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
May 03, 2016
KM
Keshava Murthy B S
IBM Smarter Process Solution Architect
Perficient (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
IBM Business Automation Workflow
5 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Based on the client's requirements we propose solutions based on IBM Business Process Manager to give them process visibility and performance metrics. It also gives them idea about pain points, areas to improve and team performance.
Pros
  • Case management - provides flexibility for dynamic processing.
  • Smarter process - streamlines repeatable activities and does work distributions.
  • Advanced integration - makes integration with other systems very easy.
Cons
  • Performance - due to high I/O with DB some of the times the flow responds slowly to changes.
  • Supporting coarse-grained services. Some of the services with nested objects and cyclical references do not generate the types on the BPM side.
  • Support a higher number of in flight instances - the system chokes and behaves erratically once the active instances goes above 20K.
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM Business Process Manager is well suited for case management.

One of the pillars of the Digital Transformation, Business Process Manager

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
November 01, 2018
EP
Efrain Pereiro
Lider de proyectos
Banco Galicia (Banking, 5001-10,000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
IBM Business Automation Workflow
6 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
IBM Business Process Manager is being used by the entire organization for all aspects of our Origination processes, whether related to retail or companies. We also use it for other processes such as First Contact Resolution and management of the reports that must be presented to the Central Bank and other institutions of control or audit.

In the case of banking, it is IBM BPM's handling of the Origination processes that provides the highest ROI, followed by its processes that have to do with client contact, and that is the strategy that we have adopted.
Pros
  • It is a very complete solution. It has a Process Manager, Operational Decision Manager for management of business rules, CASE Manager for case management, and as of this year, it also has a suite called Digital Business Automation,where FileNet and Datacap are integrated for document management, all in a single solution.
  • After a few years, we managed to make IBM Business Process Manager a robust and mature solution. Now, we are generating more than 10,000 instances daily, with an average lifetime of 25 day--with 150 intensive users, plus an occasional 2,000. We have integrations of all kinds, WebServices, Rest, Queues, etc.
  • It allows us to synchronize several Portal Servers, with a solution called Federal Portal. In it, users enter a single portal and can see and work on tasks independently of what portal these tasks are generated by.
  • This solution serves to balance the load if it is too large, and also to give a better infrastructure for our critical processes. It also is able to coexist with different versions of the product while processes are being updated. In our case, we have 3 Portal Servers integrated to a Federation Portal.
Cons
  • In the methodology of BPM, continuous improvement is essential, and for this we must be able to count on performance indicators. In order to do this, we had to develop a scheme outside the tool, because many instances did not have an adequate performance. I am informed that IBM will shortly resolve this.
  • The BPD is an established system, meaning it is monolithic, and comes with all the issues that these types of systems have.
  • It is an easy-to-use suite for simple processes, but if you need solutions with many integrations and complex screens, you need to work with experts with at least 2 years of experience.
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM BPM continues to improve every day, providing substantial improvements in each release, which is highly valuable. There are some other solutions that compete in the Gartner magic quadrant, but we have been able to partner with IBM to find a local representative who can help us with the implementation.

It is a mature and stable suite that will allow you to grow without difficulty, as long as it is properly implemented. In the first few years, we required IBM to evaluate our developments, and in this way we learned from our errors and capitalized on this knowledge base.

Complex tool, but works well.

Rating: 10 out of 10
November 12, 2012
Verified User
Vice-President in Information Technology
Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
IBM Business Automation Workflow
5 years of experience
Pros
  • System does a great job normalizing business process and automating order processing tasks. Before TeamWorks, the process was much more manual and more expensive staff ($65k to $70K) were required to manage the process. Since implementing TeamWorks, we need much lower-skilled workers to manage order processing.
  • System ensures that we have consistent data across all systems.
  • Rules engine is really the “company playbook” – it is the heart and soul of how the company works. It handles thousands of orders per day
Cons
  • Related to the importance of the system to the company, it represents a single point of failure. Company is totally dependent on the system to enable to company to function.
  • A complete order cycle might take two weeks. If a rule is modified during this cycle, the system may break (e.g. looking for a data object which is required to make a decision but which is no longer available). A new rule must be manually constructed based on the old one, and then used to replace the old rule. There is no real version control management for rules. This is something that is available on the latest version of the software.
Likelihood to Recommend

Good BPM tool with many features.

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
May 11, 2020
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 201-500 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
IBM Business Automation Workflow
3 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
IBM BPM is used as middleware in our organization. It is used in the Banking and Finance sector of our organization. It allows us to customize the flow and we can even have a track of all the activities done. When it comes to user interfaces most of the other technologies use scripting and HTML tags but we do not have a track of all the activities done. In IBM, this problem is facilitated and it saves our time as a developer in tracking the issue faster.
Pros
  • It allows us to use mobile development, which most of the other BPM suites do not provide.
  • It adapts to new technology faster. Example: They are trying to implement microservices now, which is currently trending.
  • It has the whole structure divided into parts like process center and process management, all of which make the tracking and development and monitoring instances easier.
Cons
  • The system gets crashed when many instances go into the queue stage. The system even crashes and sometimes restarts automatically when the load on the server increases. We had to develop a separate software for this and maintain the same.
  • We cannot manipulate the data during run time. It is difficult to develop user-interfaces with complex functionality.
  • In order to consume external services that follow HTTP protocol, we need to use IDE for that, and consuming services from IDE takes a lot of time to give a response.
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM BPM is recommended wherever it requires the organization to develop in multiple platforms IBM supports like mobile, cloud, and web-based development. It is recommended for processes that require complex structures. It is not recommended where the UI structures are complex and when the business requirement has more load on the server.

Should I choose IBM BPM or Pega? How strong is IBM BPM?

Rating: 9 out of 10
March 12, 2014
PS
Prasanna Selvaraj
Senior Consultant
Mindtree Ltd. (Information Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
IBM Business Automation Workflow
4 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
My customer uses IBM Business Process Manager to onboard its clients for trading in new markets. The clients basically undergo a registration process with my customer. The one big problem my customer used to have was visibility into the whole process. Without a BPMS in the past my customer was unaware of the status of the onboarding client, leading to manual phone calls and email conversations to resolve the registration process involving chaos and confusion. In the process a lot of time and money was lost both to my customer and to my customer's client. With IBM BPM on-boarding managers were empowered with real time dashboards which helped them to act on exceptions when they happened not after something had happened. This was a department level usecase.
Pros
  • IBM BPM's biggest strength is process modeling. With blueworks its a cake walk to white board processes to stakeholders and chat around.
  • IBM BPM Coaches went through a significant improvement with a easy to customize views, rich Dashboards and REST API for building complex portals. This is a game changer when compared with Pega which is little rigid when it comes to displaying BPM tasks on external portals.
  • With IBM BPM Advanced there is a way to enforce a clean architecture. Long running system to system level processes can get into BPEL Process Server, short running system to system transactions on WESB and human interactions on the Lombardi Process Server. Basically IBM BPM supports SOA to the core. So bottom line is IBM BPM supports human centric, integration centric BPM methodologies. With CMIS support, document centric capabilities are well supported too. This is a another distinguishing feature from Pega which isn't too integration centric.
Cons
  • IBM BPM should bring in the Agile methodology and enforce it as a way to build software. If its comes from IBM there is very little chance that vendors can mess around the SDLC, jeopardizing project implementations.
  • IBM BPM should enhance the traceability of implementation with requirements. Blueworks to Process Modeling works well for the first time implementation, however when a process needs enhancement or improvements, the modeling represetation gets blurred due to implementation details. This can be currently worked around with stricter goverance around process modeling, but would like IBM to come up with a solution
  • Merging of snapshots - something needs to be done on this aspect
  • A tool to peek into process data BLOB. Ability to change the process data at runtime - Nice to have.
Likelihood to Recommend
Have your process first on paper
Its important to first document the process before venturing into BPMS. It will save a lot of pain and heartaches. A BPM tool is no
magic bullet, it merely automates your process. Its upto you to put visibility and tracking on top of it. Provide monitoring so that
you get a chance to improve your process continously.
BPM is not an application
If you are trying to build an application with BPM, chances are that your are alraedy failing. BPM must be a strategic initiative for an
organization. Yes, you build Dashboards, Reports and other software in BPMS, however you do it at a process level not at an application
level.
http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2011/05/bpm-initiative.html
Know the difference between process data and business data
http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2011/05/lombardi-best-practices.html
http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2012/02/bpm-system-architecture.html
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