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Oracle BPM 11g for Automation, Efficiency and Visibility
Updated November 18, 2014

Oracle BPM 11g for Automation, Efficiency and Visibility

Shawn Ruff | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Software Version

11g

Modules Used

  • Composer, Studio, Process Spaces, Process Analytics, Unified Process Engine, Adapters, Human Workflow

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle BPM Suite

My team and I at Mythics, Inc. provide consulting and implementation support for the Oracle BPM Suite to many customers in the Federal, State & Local, Higher Ed., and Commercial sectors. Typically the implementation starts at a smaller scale within a particular department within the organization, and after some initial success it quickly spreads across the organization. Usually the Oracle BPM implementation is the result of a business process modernization or automaton effort and is almost always accompanied by SOA. The SOA could be pre-existing or coupled with the BPM implementation. The biggest challenges Oracle BPM addresses are redundant, manual, inefficient and disconnected business processes. Implemented properly Oracle BPM provides a platform for efficiently automating and managing end-to-end business processes.
  • The web-based Process Composer and BPM Studio IDE is very user friendly (for both tech and business users) and gives you a nice WYSIWYG interface for modeling and building business processes.
  • There are many adapters that provide easy integration with many third-party applications, databases, files, email, social and other integration points.
  • Process Accelerators are available for many commonly used business processes to provide a "jump start" for organizations with a common need - they are releasing new accelerators regularly.
  • Many of the commonly used basic and advanced work flow and process activities are easily configured through the Composer or Studio and advanced features can be easily developed by users with expertise in XML and Java.
  • There is not a very clean or efficient way to upgrade from BPM 10g to BPM 11g since they are built on very different platforms - while this is only an issue if you have made significant investments of time and resources in BPM 10g, but still something that can be improved upon as many organizations want to take advantage of the new features and capabilities of Oracle BPM 11g, but do not want to take on the task of migrating their existing BPM 10g as it is overly complex and time consuming.
  • While the tools are moving ever closer to being "Business User" friendly, they are still more geared towards technical staff - savvy business users that have good understanding of BPMN and basic understanding of XML can proficiently utilize BPM 11g, but for the vast majority of busines users, the tool is still too complicated.
  • One example of an Oracle BPM implementation that we supported for a Federal Government customer resulted in the automation of a manual paper-based process which took on average 4 days to complete; after implementing SOA and BPM to automate the process the completion time decreased to < 6 hours and avoided duplication or effort that was taking place at each step of the process.
All are fairly similar in capabilities, but the Oracle BPM Suite has good support for BPMN 2.0, integrates well with open standards and has an excellent design/development platform when compared to the other BPM vendors. The Oracle BPM Suite integrates well with the complimentary Oracle Fusion Middleware products that typically accompany a BPM implementation, making it a part of an overall well integrated solution set. Oracle BPM also has very good monitoring, reporting and analytics support built-in.
We are invested in the Oracle BPM Suite technology and are very comfortable with direction is has been moving and excited to see the roadmap enhancement items that are planned for the Oracle BPM 12c release in the future. We expect that additional support for BPMN 2.0 events and additional adapters and Process Accelerators will continue to enhance our use of the product.
Oracle BPM is well suited to organizations and environments that have a good understanding of their business processes and organizational structures. Trying to introduce a tool such as Oracle BPM into the organization without a good grasp on how the business operates is a recipe for disaster as the implementation will uncover all of the dirty secrets of an organizations business processes and bring them to light. BPM is not to be utilized for smaller service orchestrations or technical service implementations, these should be handled by the Oracle SOA Suite using the BPEL process manager, leaving BPM to handle the organizational business processes, referring to and including lower level services and BPEL processes as needed.