CA Process Automation Reviews

As a developer, the biggest time-saver was its import/export features and versioning. Using template-based process objects and code, I was able to make extremely complex changes with a great deal of success and ease across hundreds of objects, which took minutes, as opposed to having to use the GUI, which would have taken days. The ability to import objects as new versions of existing objects, and the ability to make the prior version the current version aided in development, bug fixes, and deployments.

I used the product to develop a process orchestration “framework” to be used in systems integrations between customer and internal ITSM applications (e.g., primarily for Change Management, CMDB, Incident Management, Problem Management, and Request Management). The framework, which made excellent use of stored procedures, included the following dynamic request-driven features:

• request routing (e.g., ensuring a request from “ACME” gets to its intended recipient)
• request sequencing (e.g., ensuring an update request from “ACME” is held until proof of the insert request from “ACME” has completed, and ensuring requests are processed based on the order they were submitted to the framework, as opposed to the order in which they were received by the framework)
• exception handling (e.g., retrying a step within a particular process, resubmitting requests, timing-out requests, and reporting exceptions back to requesters)
• data validation (e.g., ensuring each request comprised the data needed to ensure the successful delivery of the request)
• data transformations (e.g., data look-ups and data overrides)
• data delivery (e.g., primarily using SOAP and RESTful web services for both synchronous and asynchronous request deliveries and acknowledgements)
• request acknowledgement (e.g., during synchronous request delivery, the framework was capable of producing an acknowledgement request on behalf of the recipient, if one was required)
• relationship maintenance (e.g., the framework supported one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many record relationships between customer and internal ITSM applications)

In order to accomplish all of this, I made use of CA Process Automation objects (e.g., Processes, Start Request Forms, Calendars, Schedules, and Datasets) and operators (e.g., Run JavaScript, Invoke SOAP Method, Execute Process, and Query Database). Using template objects and template code in combination with extremely robust stored procedures and tables, developers were able to release brand new integrations during every two-week development cycle with a very minimal number of defects discovered during testing. At the end of testing, it was proved the product and the framework was capable of serving every design, performance, and support requirement for our day 1 and day 2 operational needs.

It’s a simple interface to be able to automate our process as needed. It gives us the ability to go into the workflow that had halted for any reason, to research the issue, fix the problem, and continue the workflow. If you’re 600 servers into a 900-server workflow, you don’t have to restart the whole thing.

We took our server provisioning process from about 30 days to about 4 days on the first iteration of implementation. That was in 2012. Now we’ve got provisioning a stack of servers in about 2 hours. We’ve automated probably 15 or 20 manual processes that run on a regular schedule.

Our primary use case for CA Process Automation is that we are supporting this technology's digital transformation. This means we are consulting our customers for their business processes, and we make sure that their requirements will be transformed into digitalization. 

• It is very scalable.
• It is user-friendly.
• It allows us to connect all platforms. 
• It allows us to connect people and processes. 
• We have the ability from our business process model that the digital view is very similar to CA Process Automation.

There are several valuable features--

• The ability to tie together many systems; overall orchestration of these systems.
• The ability to troubleshoot problem workflows in the middle of execution.
• We use PA for right-sizing VMs, so changing CPU and memory sizes. If for some reason we can’t connect to it or the VM is set in a certain way where it’s resource limited, it’ll allow us to troubleshoot it instead of failing.

It gives us predictability in terms of our use of the solution becuase we can standardize our implementations. That means we can implement more quickly with fewer resources in a process that has been fleshed out over time.

We have a slogan at my company: PAM can do everything.

What I like about it is the user interfaces. I also like the fact that there are so many ways that they offer it -- Web Service connectors, Service Desk connectors, and job descriptions that allow you to build around your design.

PAM is a very powerful tool.

I don't feel like there's a a problem we can't solve if we have to go outside the native product that we are dealing with, whether that's Service Desk or Catalog. If there's something we can't do in those natively, we can always find a way to do it with PAM.

I can really see ourselves using PAM purely in the stand alone environment. We are using it to integrate all the different products that we have with CA. I can see it being used even if we were using other third-party products like Remedy.

PAM has the ability to integrate and build solutions that work well in CA's suite of service management products and those that are outside of service management.

The capability of connecting to unlimited number of databases, email servers, and SOAP services.

Before implementing this product, our Problem and Change Management Processes were very poor. We were unable to implement complex business rules, so our analysts had to do a lot of manual activities and we were very dependent on people’s personal knowledge. Nowadays, thanks to CA Process Automation (PAM), we no longer have this problem. Since PAM is capable of running almost any kind of task, we now have all of the processes' rules placed inside of it.

CA Process Automation manager is a very powerful production tool. It has built a lot of processes for the following:

• Server deployment
• Onboarding workflows
• Integrations with multiple products. 

It is a true orchestration engine. We have implemented solution for several clients. I could instrument a lot of client requirements in this product. I have seen this product evolve from day one.

• Integration plugins 
• Approval console
• Flexibility within the tool so you can have subprocesses. 
• Easy to debug and troubleshoot.

We're just getting into PAM and we don't have many processes in there, but I have plenty of ideas on what I want to do with it. But what I've used of it, I've seen that the value lies in just being able to automate things such that there's less human interaction with it and, therefore, more consistency in our automations.

We're required to engage with less human interaction for the processes. It takes the errors out and makes it more consistent. It's simple for our team to use because you only need to drag-and-drop connections.