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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 ...
Continue reading
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
Continue reading
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)

Kunal Jaipuriar's review

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
March 07, 2022
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 10,001+ employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
IBM Business Automation Workflow
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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 domain. It is easier to use if compared with the Pega platform. Also, we have better tracking options
Pros
  • Process automation
  • Workflows
  • Reduce manual effort
  • Flow customization
Cons
  • Hang issue causing system to crash upon more load
  • Migration of service take time
  • Run time data manipulation is not possible
Likelihood to Recommend
It is best suited for streamlining business processes in our enterprise. It acts as middleware and allows to use of mobile development

IBM BPM - the best commercial BPM software package

Rating: 10 out of 10
December 24, 2015
SF
Scott Francis
Founder and Chief Technology Officer
BP3 Global, Inc. (Information Technology and Services, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
IBM Business Automation Workflow
10 years of experience
View profile
Pros
  • Coordinates work across departments.
  • Organizes processes around customer inputs and outcomes rather than around silos and divisions.
  • Integrates with other software systems in a straightforward way.
  • Provides efficient UI building functionality - for UIs on mobile, tablet, and desktop browsers.
  • Measures efficiency, process outcomes, SLAs.
  • Particularly strong in Financial processes (loan origination, insurance underwriting, asset management, bond processing), but also works well for logistics processes and customer services processes.
Cons
  • Installation is (typically) a bit painful out of the box and requires expert help.
  • Following installation, initial projects require outside consulting expertise to be successful. Projects without importing BPM expertise tend to have much higher failure rates. Though individually the technologies involved are widely available and not complicated, combined and collectively BPM solutions require a flexible, creative, technical talent to help deliver. It takes time to learn the judgment and craft required.
  • The out-of-the-box UI controls (widgets) are not terribly inspiring- on desktop or mobile. Use of third party toolkits (e.g. Brazos) is recommended. Silver lining: those third party toolkits are quite good.
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM BPM is enterprise software. It has some of the generic pros/cons of enterprise software, some of which didn't get covered in this review. It is increasingly available in the cloud - and increasingly supports mobile scenarios. In some ways it benefits from getting to the party late, and having cloud and mobile infrastructure so much easier to build upon.

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.

Overall a good BPM engine, but use it for what it's meant to be

Rating: 7 out of 10
March 17, 2014
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Music Company, 501-1000 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
IBM Business Automation Workflow
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
IBM Business Process Manager is used at our company to standardize, automate, and measure business processes. It is envisioned that the whole organization will use BPM. It will standardize business processes because optimal processes will be designed and implemented in BPM. There will not be a lot of room for variation. Manual processes like mailing forms will be automated. We will be able to monitor and measure processes through BPM's built in reporting.
Pros
  • BPMN diagrams are somewhat easy to read and comprehend for non-technical business users.
  • BPM Coaches allow developers to rapidly develop simple User Interfaces.
  • BPM allows developers to call basic SOA services easily.
Cons
  • If you need to develop complex User Interfaces, they are very hard to implement using Coaches.
  • If you need to call SOA Services that have complex data structures such as recursively nested objects and anyType objects, the built in service discovery and type generation does not support it and blows up.
  • The Process Designer IDE tends to run very slow because of all the chatting it has to do with the server side Process Center.
Likelihood to Recommend
BPM is well suited for simple as well as complex approval workflows. It is well suited for simple User Interfaces. The BPM Coach feature is not well suited if you need complex User Interfaces. If you need to use complex User Interfaces with BPM then you are better off using Portlets. It is also not well suite if you have SOA services that have a lot of types, recursive references, and anyType attributes.

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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