Oracle BPM is old
January 16, 2019

Oracle BPM is old

Cristian Bodnarasec | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle BPM Suite

We have used Oracle BPM Suite to automate business processes across the organization, one of them being the creation and approvals of various business documents using long running tasks (with HumanTask). We moved to BPM from Outlook flow for approvals and the difference was tremendous. Having one place to see all processes and their statuses, adding reminders for overdue tasks, escalation, and delegation was really making a difference at that time.
  • Modeling business processes - it is providing an interface where users can drag and drop many kinds of shapes to build a business process.
  • HumanTask - I consider this as being the key strength of Oracle BPM. It allows you to create approval flows in different ways and it manages the long-running processes (while waiting for people to interact with the flow).
  • The user-interface for user tasks - it is one place where you can see all tasks and their progress. Admins can see and interact with other people's tasks.
  • Oracle BPM is left behind by other tools more modern in terms of user experience, usability and ability to integrate with everything else.
  • To really harvest the potential of Oracle BPM you need to do it in JDeveloper and with ADF. This restricts its usage to very technical people.
  • The administration of the Oracle BPM tools has really put a burden on our team. It is running on Weblogic and we experience issues very often either with performance or with a bad configuration of the system.
  • As with all Oracle products, the price can be an issue for smaller shops.
  • When we moved to Oracle BPM many years ago, it was a huge uplift for our business processes because we didn't have any tool to model flows except Outlook and Excel.
  • We established and streamlined the manufacturing workflows that were needed with the growth of the business.
  • We discovered after a while that the ROI was not great since along with the cost of the tools, we had to account the cost of development from the software team too. It took a lot of time to deliver our first automations due to the big learning curve needed for Oracle BPM.
The competition for Oracle BPM Suite is far ahead. With a more modern user-interface, very well thought out usability, integration with virtually everything, any new tool for business processes will be better. The biggest difference is, in my opinion, being able to target the tool to non-technical people (like business analysts, project managers) and be successful. Those are the reasons we actually chose Boomi for our business processes automation and systems integration.
There are other more modern tools out there that will do what Oracle BPM does but much better. Oracle BPM didn't keep up with competition in terms of:
- user experience
- usability of the tools
- integration with everything else, whether it is in the cloud or local
- performance
- the ease of the administration
- targeting all kind of users, not only technical
- cost

Oracle BPM Suite Feature Ratings

Process designer
4
Process simulation
6
Business rules engine
6
SOA support
7
Process player
8
Support for modeling languages
8
Form builder
4
Model execution
7
Not Rated
Social collaboration tools
Not Rated
Dashboards
7
Standard reports
7
Custom reports
6
Content management
7