IBM BPM Reviews

We use IBM BPM for brokerage operations transactions, and workflow and process automation for those transactions. We use it for straight workflow and process automation. We have some straight through processing (STP), but most of it is human intervention. Therefore, we will start a process, which will start by requiring some sort of human intervention step, like a review or approval, then it will post to a system of record afterwards.

It has performed very well. We have had it for almost eight years. We will be hitting over a million transactions a day by the end of the year, so it is pretty successful.

• Easy to use
• Easy to develop
• It is transparent to business users because it is mostly picture based modelling.
• Easy for people to understand what the application is doing.

Turnaround time: It is easy to take a requirement, put it in the code, and deploy it. 

We have used a lot of out-of-the-box reporting on the process performance metrics. We have been able to make suggested changes to staff for this role or streamlining by eliminate some activities where people were not requiring a lot of work in the first place.

Some performance stuff around tasks and indexing. We know that there are changes coming in this space.

A lot of the management stuff: It is a rather thick stack because you have to have WebSphere skills, IBM BPM skills, and an understanding of how the product runs on WebSphere. A lot of this will start to get a lot easier as they put it in containers, which will allow the platform to manage itself in some regards.

Performance in the development environment space. I know that they have been taking it off the desktop version and putting on the web, and it is not 100% yet.

A lot of the features of the product are old. It would be nice to see those updated. They are on the roadmap. Hopefully, they will get around to them at some point.

It wavers. We have some opportunities for improvement in this space, especially as we approach our target volume of a million transactions a day. It is tough, because it is not necessarily the product. It is more around the platform and infrastructure to support it, so the connectivity to the database, web sessions, and reverse proxies in front of that. Therefore, the whole environment plays into how the application performs.

It has been okay so far, knock on wood. We are in the middle of refreshing our topology right now. We are trying to figure out if there are potential advantages that we have not been able to look at before by orchestrating how we cluster and divide the deployment environment, so we will see what happens.

We started with some processes that were about five or six a day to our target processes, which will be about hundred of thousands a day. The big effort now is to taking models from MQ Workflow and putting those into BPM. Obviously, MQ Workflow has been decommissioned and is end-of-life (EOL) later this year. We had 45 or so applications on MQ Workflow and we have been moving those over to BPM. That has been most of the work right now. 

We log PMRs constantly and the technical support has been great about providing Level 3 support. We have had some direct interaction with Level 3 personnel who provide easy, quick answers that we did not know, then we can implement those changes right away. We have definitely been happy with their response time.

We did not have a BPM solution previously. 

The initial setup was very complex. This was back on IBM BPM 7.5, so they had just converted from calling it Lombardi to IBM BPM. It was new infrastructure for us. We had some security and infrastructure constraints unique to the product that we had to work in. We did not previously have a huge WebSphere or Linux presence. We had some custom code at the beginning, but we have mainly moved away from that, and are pretty much out-of-the-box IBM BPM at this point.

We used IBM WebSphere software services for the initial setup because it was a new platform for them. They had just acquired it from Lombardi and were excited about having a role model for themselves for setup. Also, it was brand new for us, so any help we could receive was appreciated.

We have definitely seen ROI. When we first kicked it off, we said it had to pay for itself within three years, and it did. That is one of the reasons we have been able to keep the platform around.

We evaluated two other BPM platforms and did a PoC with one of them. Then we decided on Lombardi, and they were bought. After that, we decided on IBM BPM.

We did a PoC with Pega and looked at Appian, but settled on IBM BPM.

We chose IBM BPM because of the management that comes with the product: The performance stuff out-of-the-box around how efficient is the process and how efficient are the people involved (or how inefficient). The ability to view these metrics out-of-the-box without having to do a lot of work on top of that. Everything is coupled together and comes as one solution.

It is more than just a new development tool for IT. You need a capability within IT to support it, run it on the right platform, and have the right developers to develop within it. It is somewhat of a unique skill set. It is not Java development nor web development, it is a hybrid of both. Most importantly, you need business partners who are process-oriented. Anyone can put processes in a line and call it a workflow, but if you have process engineers who can find eligible processes for management, this is really important. Your business partners should be willing to define metrics in the process and work on changing the process. Therefore, it is not a new development tool, but a whole methodology around managing business processes in the IT and the business side. It is a little more of an endeavor than just buying the product and saying, "I use IBM BPM now."

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Originally, it was ease of development and the model-based development environment. It was entirely drag and drop plus pictures, so business people could comprehend.

We use it for process or case management in the healthcare industry. We use it to make sure that, when a case moves between operators, that the right level of people approve the workflow. It causes the processes to pull the information back in, so we can redact the case appropriately.

When we started out it was a little painful, but as we adopted it to the healthcare industry practices that we have to follow, it has helped in faster development.

We don't use it with any other IBM products. We actually built our own processes for how applications behave, so we use the process engine piece of it to redirect the workflow appropriately. When a case or support ticket comes in to the customer service reps, we look at the information and, using the process engine, we figure out which process in the workflow we need to call to get the information back in. Then the customer service rep can use it to appropriately manage the case that they're looking at or investigating.

I'm not sure that it has improved our organization, per se, but the speed to market, delivery of our processes and rules that change constantly, it helps a lot with that.

Also, not having to build our own and customize it is another advantage.

In terms of impacting our ability to change or update our processes, we haven't gotten there yet. We are legally bound by what the rules are, and other issues, so there is only so much we can do, our hands are tied. But we are definitely looking at robotic process-automation, to see if that can help and solve some of our issues. We are going to be working with the IBM RPA team to see if any of those can be derived from the existing processes to benefit it. That is something we are looking at here.

From an architecture perspective, the thing that we like about it is the ease by which our development teams could pick the tool up. That was cool.

The Process Designer is good. We like how we can drag and drop and link the processes up, that works out great for us.

We also like the monitoring, support, and stability of the platform.

When we compare it, with respect to migration upgrades, we find it to be much faster and much cheaper than the other vendor. We have both products in-house, so we are actually evaluating from a price-comparison perspective, as well as from a development and skill-set-availability perspective, across the products, as well.

One of the things that we are looking at is cognitive learning. IBM has another product called IBM RPA, I think, which is doing some of that stuff. We would like to see more of that with respect to cognitive learning and AI put back into the process engine to help.

Process engines have been here for a long time now. When you look at IBM BPM it provides the same stability that most engines do today. I think it is more in terms of development time and the ease of learning it that helped us more.

It is not as heavy as a Pega workflow system which is customized and has a lot more things you can do with it, but we don't need that level of complexity.

We haven't had any issues yet in terms of scaling it out to our customer service reps. You never know, it depends on the complexity, what it's going to look like in the future.

It's cheaper than Pega, definitely.

I haven't personally talked with anybody yet in technical support. I don't think we've had a need to. From a design and consulting perspective we did reach out to IBM to get some help to improve our processes in terms of development; not the actual process engine though.

There is more stability in that team to deliver things faster, so that helps.

We used Pega. Pega can be used both as a workflow engine and a process engine. We have our own internally built process engine too, written in Java, but it's more customized to a certain issue and we are not able to scale it out. That's why we looked at Pega and IBM BPM.

When looking at vendors - we sell a health platform to our clients, the Blue Cross and Blue Shields of the world - and one of the things we look at is, when we sell a platform, how can we reduce the cost of the platform, to reduce healthcare costs at the end of the day. We keep on evaluating products based on the licensing cost and the cost to run it, the consulting rates for each product.

We look at the scalability and stability of the platform too. We also look at what other capabilities there are, the capabilities of the future, and that's one of the reasons we are going towards robotic process-automation, trying to automate some of these mundane tasks that people have to perform manually. Although it is process-oriented, it is still difficult to figure things out across multiple applications.

The initial set up was easy. The challenge was in adopting it into the release and deployment processes that we have in-house, what we have to follow for the healthcare industry. There was a little bit of a challenge trying to figure out how to take the process and put the appropriate release management processes in place to follow our auditing compliance.

We have ironed that out now and we are able to develop and showcase the product much faster when we compare it with something like Pega. Pega has a process engine that we use. Our development times are much faster in IBM BPM, as well as the pricing is even better than Pega.

We looked at Pega, it's very expensive in terms of licensing. We are now looking at Red Hat's implementation of the BPM tool to see, from a price point ratio, how it behaves as well. Red Hat has a business process engine, their JBoss BRMS does that, so we are evaluating it.

We do evaluate, over time, how we can reduce our internal cost to provide a better solution.

In terms of advice to a colleague who is looking this or a similar solution, I think it is based on the needs of the company, overall, in terms of the business capabilities, the business development, is it a stable platform. And at the end of the day it's the total cost of ownership which is the key. You always have to look at that from your company's perspective. IBM BPM might be the best tool out there, but if you don't have the appropriate training and funding it's going to be a challenge. That's true of any other tool too.

That's why we're evaluating Pega and IBM BPM. Our teams are liking BPM better because it's faster to set up and they have showcased two or three projects where they were able to do them in a three-month cycle, where it really should take them seven or eight months, and it would take more in Pega. So we see the benefits, but we need to constantly look at technologies because, in the market, things are evolving over time, and that's one of the reasons we are looking at automating some of the processes too.

We evaluate every three to six months, to make sure we are ahead of the curve and looking at what the market is bringing to the table to reduce the total cost of ownership. So something like robotic process-automation where, with cognitive learning, it can figure out some of the processes and improve them automatically, is something that we are looking into big-time.

Helped our organization move from paper work to automated work.

• Reach with Integration Adapters
• Support for adding custom Java code

• The product is extremely complex to use and administrate.
• It can definitely be improved in terms of performance and stability.
• Process versioning was tricky, not straightforward.

Under load, the server crashes and many of the applications become lost. You have to handle this manually. In some cases, we had to resubmit the applications from start.

Server crashes under heavy load.

Customer support is good.

The first level of tech support does not provide much assistance. You need the ticket to reach a high level to start to see results.

No previous solution.

Very complex. Too many steps need to be done at the database and server levels, and complex configurations. From what I see, a lot of these steps can be and should be automated.

Sometimes, after updates, the modules did not work and we had to remove the application and deploy as new.

Process Server is no more available than new products out there, but in general IBM has a high cost and complex setup.

My advice to others looking into implementing this product is "Don't."

• The process creation
• Task creation
• User management
• Task allocation
• Rich UI and third party integration

The above features have helped me to build a successful application.

It has reduced the time a human spends in completing the jobs using spreadsheets and other traditional methods.

There are a few areas, like triggering mechanisms, externally exposed variables, and changing its values, which need to be revisited, as they do not sometimes function properly. However, this is a rare scenario.

Seven years.

No, it is highly stable.

No.

I would give their technical support an eight and a half out of 10 as a rating.

No, I did not previously use a different solution.

The initial setup is quite simple and user-friendly to perform.

I am unclear about the pricing and licensing as I do not deal with such matters. I only develop things from the tool.

Not applicable to me.

If you are looking for a product which should be capable of handling SOA principles, third-party integration, and effective user management, I highly recommend this product for you.

• Workflow implementation
• It follows BPMN notation.
• Quick to automate workflows. Allows for quick design and build of the workflow.
• Strong integration capabilities in both Standard and Advanced version.
• In-built ECM capabilities as well.

It introduces process orchestration with adherence and process optimization into the organization. Also, it provides visibility and insight into the process within an organization.

• Development of user interfaces
• Load time (performance) of the user interfaces

I have used this solution for nine years.

• Product is pretty stable, if sized correctly with the right platform architecture.
• Even the version migrations have improved and simplified for IBM BPM 8.5.x.

No.

Ajax services are most important to me, but currently we've moved them more into status closed. This is because we are using the HL7 version of iBPM. Thus, the one thing that I love about them is that they make it easier to integrate with other systems, especially with the use of smaller files.

It's ability to hand over processes. There are stages of the process from one user to another, and also the ability of keeping a session. Because I'm in a financial institution, where you are originating an account for a customer and could possibly frustrate a customer. You have to keep the account's permissions process simple.

Previously, you find that 115 in the system would be for onboarding, and that was how to engage the customer's profile. Then, you have to engage with multiple other systems to actually pay that account.

The nice thing about the BPM is that it is able to hold all of those sessions to say, "Okay, this is one, two, three, then I take this process and hand it over to another system, which will also do some work, then once they are done they come back and then I pass on the information to another system."

So, the integration that the different systems use, it's what has been most valuable.

When you have to integrate files for enterprise applications. We call them ESIs. This requires a lot of work, because you have to first create the EF file and integration designer, which takes quite some time, before you can be able to consume a website.

I've been using it for two years now.

Yes, we did actually. When we were initially installing 8.5.7, it deleted the server. We encountered a lot of issues when we had to migrate processes in the old version to the new version. This was happened recently, because we only started with the 8.5.7 server this year around June.

It is quite a scalable product. On one of our projects, we are running something like 50,000 processes a day. We're able to actually handle that efficiently without a lot of hassle.

It doesn't require installation. The user doesn't have to install anything on their system. It's all in the update. So, that makes it easy to scale.

I'd have to say 10 out of 10. Because I have never called their tech support, but they always make sure they attend to whatever problems we face. Not sure that's why they attend to us only, quickly, or maybe just how their tech support team works, but from my experience, I would give them a 10 out of 10.

It wasn't complex. Putting an app on is quite easy.

No, they were the only option at that time. Also, in terms of keeping up with the industry, they're always bringing new updates and you get updates every two months. That was actually a major factor.

My advice for them would be to use the product for what it's intended for, and to not try to make it do anything rather than what it is intended for. Because there you will come across problems which you might not find the right software. Also, find people who are skilled in the product. Most of the time, when you come across problems, they were not caused by the product, but caused by the people using the product who are not very skilled in terms of using it.

It's mostly about the process designing and the additional features with IBM BPM, with the tester coach wherein you can interact with the interface while you're designing the process.

We do implementation for various clients. Most of the clients are BFSI clients, Banking and Financial Sector clients.

It's under performance, maybe the moving from one activity to other activity, or one process step to other process step takes awhile. It can be because of the database thing, so it's to do with the database processing. If the processing gets better, it would be more efficient.

Around three years.

It is a stable product, and there's quite a lot of support from IBM.

When you start implementing a new BPM in your organization, there's some questionnaires that have to be submit to IBM and IBM gives the hardware specs according to that. The performance and the load have to be taken by the system.

I would give them a seven out of 10. The organization that I'm associated with is an IBM partner, so we have priority support.

The initial is not complicated, and it's not easy; It's medium.

No, we were clear with what product we were going to go with based on our research.

When compared to other BPMs, it's very efficient for the developers to develop and deliver on time with an effective process.

Process Design, Integration Services (UCA), Event Management, Web Service Provision.

It has reduced the amount of code that we write in a process to achieve the required functionality. Also, the integration with our core product (UI interface) has improved and allowed flexibility for user assignment and management.

More features for user management and dynamic role change.

Three years.

Apart from the usual fixes (which any product encounters), generally the product works well in production.

Based on the sizing and hardware capability, we don't face any scalability issues.