Intellect BPM [EOL] Reviews

Business Automation at the speed of thought which is 100% aligned with your business! Empowered knowledge workers - anyone can be use the tool with very little training. Accelerated time to market for web and mobile solutions.

There are a few different ways my clients have improved the way they function using Intellect. First and foremost, Intellect can be deployed as an enterprise BPMS platform with automated workflow across departments, the organization, and outside business partners. This solution provides for a scalable and extendable platform that doesn't require additional licenses - you can build as many apps as you'd like without increasing your costs. From an investment standpoint, it becomes one platform across the organization instead of many single-purpose solutions, reducing not only disparate applications, but also minimizing the number and types of skills required to maintain the solutions and platform.

Secondly, anyone with spreadsheets can EASILY replace them and add workflow in very little time. All data becomes searchable immediately and access controls can be added to ensure data security and integrity.

Another example of how clients have improved their business functions is by replacing e-mail as a data repository. They now capture BUSINESS information that previously got "lost" in emails. In many organizations, e-mail serves as communication tool as well as a way to share business information. Unfortunately, e-mail data is typically unstructured and valuable business data may never be turned into usable information. Intellect leverages e-mail (SMTP) to communicate key information (e.g. a work activity requiring an approval), but the email routes the user back to the business application to perform the function and capture the business data (including things that might typically be lost such as comments associated with the approval). This is invaluable when you are dealing with business processes such as Contracts Management.

A final example of how Intellect has been successfully leveraged is using it as a "Requirements gathering and application design" tool ... rapid modeling for applications. It's so easy and quick to build forms and workflow that you could add the forms, model the workflow and quickly represent the application functionality you'd like to automate. If you determine it's not the best solution-fit for that particular business need, you at least have the requirements gathered, processes modeled and you know what you now need to seek out in other solutions. Additionally, you can use the model and the workflow, to actually communicate your needs to other solutionvendors. What we find in actuality is that Intellect remains the solution once it's configured

The most valuable feature for us is the workflow aspect of it because it's extremely powerful and completely flexible. You build your own workflows so it's got full, customizable workflows with all the features like branching and loop-backs and things that you'd expect a workflow to have. Secondly, it's versatile because it's a sort of build-your-own-application, completely customizable to meet your needs and you can do it really fast.

We wrote it specifically for a major 10-year waste water treatment plant construction project. But we also manage a whole range of construction contracts totaling $2 billion.

All of these construction contracts have processes for handling different types of information -- technical submissions, requests for information, management of financial change, pay applications, correspondence, and many other different types of documents. There are rules in the contracts about how they get handled and Intellect enabled us to systematize how we handle and process all this information.

It's allowed us to enforce and audit everything -- and scale it as well. There's now accountability because you always know where you are in the process, who owns what, and it's reduced the number of people required to administer it.

And because it's customizable, we've configured it to match the way we already work.

I’ll tell you why we approached Intellect and why we brought it on board: The US Department of Transportation has a very large IT department and I had an annual budget of $4 billion, 3000 employees, 10,000 contractors, and 200 major systems. I oversaw the Federal Aviation Administration's traffic control system, which was one of the largest systems. As CIO, I got requests from all kinds of folks in the DoT.

There are various bureaus within the DoT, the FAA being the largest. We were getting continuous requirements for developing new systems from various bureaus, our sections, managers, etc. Money in the government is never enough. We would get these requests but we didn’t have the resources to complete the tasks. I really had two options.

One option was to tell these folks that I don’t have the resources and I can’t do anything for them. What that would have done is these guys would’ve then gone and tried to get money from somewhere and tried to build the solution themselves. If they did the development themselves, that would create a problem for me somewhere in the future. That was option number one. The second option was to say that I'll do it, knowing that I never had the resources. I would either not get to doing it or would do it poorly.

I was really looking at a third option. I wanted to have an option where I would say, I am going to give you a resource or a platform which is simple enough that the business user can use and build the system out the way they like it because it is very simple. Then once you decide to operationalize it, we are going to quickly test it. Then once you do the testing, we will just add it to our entire platform and it will be operational across the entire DoT.

I was really looking at that kind of platform which was plug-and-play. We searched and searched and really never came up with a good solution. We looked at everything from SharePoint to Dynamic CRM to Salesforce. They were too complicated for the average user to actually build solutions. We were looking at Intellect to be that particular solution.

It helps in two ways: One is if you want to quickly prototype something, you can very quickly prototype and build the system out, so that's very cool for an operational system. Secondly, if you want to give your business users something to use very quickly, the system allows you to do that.

It's allowed us to quickly develop some basic applications or solutions to replace existing ones.

I think it's a good tool to use as a stepping stone. I can use the spreadsheets with something basic where they can keep track of all the information in a central location and control it with access control, user groups, things like that.

The capability to interface with other applications and systems is the most valuable feature for us. For example, Intellect built an interface to our online banking platform and core system. This gave our bank a tremendous advantage to add new features to the online banking system and have those transactions flow into Intellect where it's routed to the appropriate department and/or update the core system.

We used it to automate over 100 operational processes. The organization had embraced Intellect as the go-to method for implementing new processes. It's played a big part in the vision of end-to-end automation.

It allows us to control and manage our non-conforming audits. We can then manage the workflow and get the right information back to the right decision makers.

I also like the reporting. By way of background, we previously managed our quality systems with an Atlassian solution. While it had a lot of the same functionalities as Intellect (workflows, assignments, data gathering), it was really lacking in the ability to do different integrations between tables. It was more of a flat file.

Intellect has the ability to duplicate the same type of functionality as far as the workflows, assignments and status with the added ability to have relational database where we can do better reporting.

What we do with that report is try to improve the quality of our product. Where we were only able to get in a single dimension of various non-conformance or corrective actions or business related, we're able to have multi-dimensional reports that give us an excellent picture of what's going on in our business. We have a large supply base that forms a product in our business, and being able to make good decisions, what to do with vendors, and identify gaps has been really valuable to us.

The product is very powerful. You could automate any business process at any level of complexity, integrated with other solutions, send notifications, and generate any type of reports. The platform also allows you to create integrated iOS and Android mobile apps without custom coding.

Our approval processes are now automated and handled through Intellect, eliminating delays and unnecessary email communications.

I would say the valuable features are the form design. The form design is extremely, extremely intuitive, and also the dashboard design. I also love the drill-down capabilities and so forth. I would say it's some of the two best assets in those features in the product.

I think in terms of complication backlog, for us, our customers were a consulting outfit so any organization, any customers that have a very small or short, small IT staff and they have a backlog of work that needs to be done in terms of developing applications, I think this is a great fit for that kind of a model where you go in with no coding. You can develop applications as well as workflows very quickly.