Skip to main content
TrustRadius
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.

Read more
Recent Reviews
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing
N/A
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

Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?

30 people also want pricing

Alternatives Pricing

What is Jotform?

Jotform Enterprise is a digital workspace productivity tool that provides a platform for organizations. The aim of Jotform Enterprise is to give companies an easy-to-navigate tool that makes reaching out to customers, collaborating with coworkers, and collecting e-signatures and data a more…

What is Quixy?

Enterprises can use Quixy's cloud-based no-code platform to enable their business users (citizen developers) to automate workflows and build simple to complex enterprise-grade applications for their custom needs, according to the vendor up to ten times faster. Quixy helps eliminate manual…

Return to navigation

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 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).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(72)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-4 of 4)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Scott Francis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
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.
  • 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.
We're having great results on our projects and with our customers with IBM BPM.
It scales from small team interactions to business processes serving thousands of employees, as well as straight-through-processing needs that go well beyond. Of course, scale is always in the eye of the beholder, but IBM BPM does a good job of giving you all of the hooks, APIs, and data that you need to take on whatever scaling approaches you need to meet the load.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
  • 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.
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.
  • 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.
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.
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.
  • 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
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.
Prasanna Selvaraj | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
  • 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.
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
  • 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
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.
Enhancements to IBM BPM are excellent. What they have done to Lombardi and Process Server is the best fusion I have ever seen.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
30
Mainly used by Support and Finance – perhaps 30 people total.
1.5
  • 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
• 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)
  • In-person training
• 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.
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.
No
• 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.
• 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.
NA
  • 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.
Return to navigation