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.
Good BPM tool with many features.
One of the pillars of the Digital Transformation, Business Process Manager
IBM BPM Review
IBM BPM - the best commercial BPM software package
Overall a good BPM engine, but use it for what it's meant to be
Should I choose IBM BPM or Pega? How strong is IBM BPM?
Complex tool, but works well.
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Pricing
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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- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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What is Pipefy?
Pipefy headquartered in San Francisco offers their process management and workflow software providing processes for customer success, service desk, sales operations, and other processes.
Product Details
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What is IBM Business Automation Workflow?
IBM Business Automation Workflow Video
IBM Business Automation Workflow Competitors
IBM Business Automation Workflow Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
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Operating Systems | , |
Mobile Application | No |
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(72)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-4 of 4)IBM BPM - the best commercial BPM software package
- 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.
- We use IBM BPM more to help our customers than to help ourselves. For our customers, IBM BPM has helped us dramatically reduce cycle time of previously manual processes, while increasing accuracy and customer satisfaction. However, it is difficult to get customers to go on record with ROI as they treat this as confidential/private information.
- 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.
- 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.
- Creating a Coach UI
- Calling a simple Web Service
- Claiming and submitting a task
- 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
Should I choose IBM BPM or Pega? How strong is IBM BPM?
- 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.
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
- Improved process visibility
- A realistic chance of improving process, continously
- Real time tracking and alerting, empowers managers to take decisions on the fly when error happens, not after something had happened
Pega is a comprehensive suite which offers a unique theme of BPM development in the market. A no-coding approach based on rules with inheritance makes Pega a very powerful product. However Pega, falls short on integration centric capabilities and very rigid to customize. On the other hand IBM comes with array of products which suits needs of varying degree. Advanced integration is solved by BPEL Process Server which has support for state based patterns and mediation. Dynamic rules and event management can be solved with WODM, Cloud to on-premise connectivity with Cast Iron, Enterprise gateway and security usecases with DataPower, Social BPM with IBM BPM , WODM, mobify with Worklight.
Pega has a little bit of eveything here and there. It solves the dynamic rule management, brings out the flavor of Social BPM and mobility with Antenna ( I guess) and predictive analytics as well in one single suite. There are certain usecases which needs to have a little bit of everything, however this little bits and pieces of functionality when its blows, Pega would have problems to scale. With IBM its a bit nightmare to maintain a variety of technologies, however you can wish to go for one without the other and go for something only when you truly need it.
Pega vs IBM
Its difficult to pick a winner. In nutshell when you want a full scale BPM with rich integration capabilities go for IBM BPM. On the other hand if you hava mature integration capability already, Pega can yield quick results for you as well. Pega's strength is its methodology. IBM BPM's strength is integration. Actually you can't go wrong with both in terms of implementation. My strong recommendation is to invest time to process analysis and pick a good vendor to support consulting and implementation.
Complex tool, but works well.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Implemented in-house
- In-person training
- SFDC / Great Plains / Customer Portal (home grown)