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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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Awards

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Pricing

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IBM Business Automation Workflow

IBM Business Automation Workflow

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Unavailable

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • 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 and Ratings

(72)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-2 of 2)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 17, 2014

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

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Music Company, 501-1000 employees
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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 and Cons
  • 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.
  • 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.
Return on Investment
  • We are documenting our business processes using BPMN.
  • We are forced to think deeply about our processes and optimize them as a result.
  • We are getting rid of manual processes such as mailing paper forms.
  • We can monitor our processes and improve them constantly.
Alternatives Considered
BPM was purchased together with other products from IBM's InfoSphere and WebSphere offerings before I came here. I have personally worked with alternatives at a previous jobs. I have developed workflows using SharePoint. I have developed workflows using Documentum's workflow engine. I have also worked on an in-house workflow engine. IBM BPM is the best BPM engine I have ever worked with.
Likelihood to Renew
7
This particular decision will be made by other people. Overall IBM BPM is the best BPM engine that I have worked with. It is implemented at our company and IT and business are already somewhat familiar with it. Therefore if asked I will recommend renewal as long as the price is reasonable.
Easy Tasks
  • Creating a Coach UI
  • Calling a simple Web Service
  • Claiming and submitting a task
Difficult Tasks
  • Developing a complex UI
  • Calling a complex Web Service
  • Development can be slow because Process Designer IDE chats with server side Process Center a lot
Usability
8
Building complex UIs can be cumbersome. Calling complex SOA services that have a lot of objects, types, anyType attributes, recursive object references, etc can be cumbersome. The Process Designer IDE communicates with the server side Process Center a lot and as a result it is pretty slow. The IDE is also Eclipse based which doesn't make it faster.
November 12, 2012

Complex tool, but works well.

Verified User
Vice-President in Information Technology
Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros and Cons
  • 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
  • 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.
Return on Investment
  • Data consistency. Data in SFDC is not kept updated automatically without requiring salespeople or others to manually keep the system up to date.
  • Automation means that order processing is much easier for staff – less skilled people needed.
Likelihood to Renew
10
Likelihood to Recommend
Users and Roles
30
Mainly used by Support and Finance – perhaps 30 people total.
Support Headcount Required
1.5
Business Processes Supported
  • Order management. Sales orders are entered in SFDC by salespeople and all of the processing and business rules for order management are handled by the TeamWorks business rules engine. Integration with SFDC is extremely important.
Implementation Details / Implementation Partner
  • Implemented in-house
Implementation Rating
9
• Very satisfied – not too difficult at all. • We had a consultant available as part of our contract, but we didn’t really need to use (except for some advice on ActiveDirectory and single sign-on)
Training Types Used
  • In-person training
In-Person Training
9
• Attended on premise sysadmin training for 4 days, 8 hours per day. Although further follow-up training was available, I never felt the need to go back. Training was very hands-on with real modeling (rather than just following a manual). Very effective.
Additional Customization Considerations
This software is, by definition, heavily customized. It does not come out-of-the-box ready to go. The rules engine must be built and configured to support business rules specific to the business. Some advice: • Follow the documentation closely – it is very accurate and helpful. • Configuration mainly consisted of changing configuration files / domain names • We modified the documentation somewhat in an internal wiki to reflect our internal process but would be prepared to share with other similar businesses.
Premium Support
No
Support Rating
9
• Always get a response to a support ticket in less than 2 hours • Urgent tickets are usually responded to within 15 minutes • Support staff generally are familiar with our setup and it’s not necessary to explain things multiple times – frequently talk to the same person who is very familiar with our setup.
Usability
8
• The system is easy enough to use but, by definition, is a complex tool. However, they have done a good job generally balancing tool complexity / capability with usability. When comparing to MS Biz Talk, for example, Biz Talk has less functionality but is actually harder to use. • Software is very flexible. For somebody with the right technical background, it’s quite easy to write some Java code to overcome any hurdles or make the product do what is needed.
Reliability and Availability
NA
Systems Integrated With
  • SFDC / Great Plains / Customer Portal (home grown)
• All integrations are XML / web services based and were fairly simple to build. SFDC needed its own middleware.
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