1. Home
  2. Business Process Management (BPM) Tools
  3. IBM Business Automation Workflow Reviews
  4. User Review of IBM Business Automation Workflow
Complex tool, but works well.
November 12, 2012

Complex tool, but works well.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction

  • 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.

Product Usage

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.

Implementation

• 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)
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • 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.

Configuration

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.


Support

• 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

• 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

Integration

  • 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.