IBM Business Automation Workflow

Process automation

Workflows

Reduce manual effort

Flow customization

Hang issue causing system to crash upon more load

Migration of service take time

Run time data manipulation is not possible

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.