IBM BPM Reviews

I used it in my previous company where we did a lot of work with banks, financial institutions, and accounting firms. We were primarily using it for automating business processes, but a lot of them were really custom applications that used the process engine for making things happen. We were using it in innovative ways to make that BPM process engine do lots of other things that I'm not sure it was really ever designed to do. There was a lot of financial stuff. There were financial calculations that would fire off a SQL process and then get the results back. 

I liked its robustness the most. It was a very robust platform in my experience. It seemed like a very stable and powerful tool for handling lots of concurrent users and hammering at the system. 

It is a really powerful tool, but its entry price is so high, which makes it a very exclusive club for who gets to use it. 

The thing that seemed to be the most intolerable was that you could put lots and lots of users on it, and it worked fine, but if you put lots and lots of developers on it, it sure seemed to have challenges. The biggest challenge was the development because of the Eclipse tool. It just seemed like irrespective of the development team that you put together, whether it had 10 or 50 people, you would end up having to reboot the development server throughout the day when you concurrently had lots of people hammering on the system. The development server just got sluggish. This was true for every project I was on. Once you got more than about five people working on the system at the same time, it would just get slower and slower during development work, and the only way to fix it was to reboot the server. It became just like a routine. Sometimes, we would reboot at lunch or dinner time, which is silly. After the cloud instances started rolling out, I never saw that again. That was probably the one big advantage of the cloud version. Instead of using an independent Eclipse-based process development tool, we moved to web-based process and design. The web-based tool definitely had greater performance than the Eclipse-based tool. I never got onto another project after that with 50 people, so I don't know how the performance is when you get a large team on it, but it definitely seems that the cloud design tool was a massive improvement.

I have been using this solution for a little over seven years.

It was very stable. 

It is a powerful system. It can scale to really big numbers in terms of the number of users. You can put lots and lots of users on it, and it works fine, but if you put lots and lots of developers on it, it seems to have challenges.

It was a development house, and we had 25 people using it, but now, because of COVID, they have cut back, and there are probably 14 or 15 people left.

There are different kinds of tech support. There is the free knowledge-based stuff, and they also have really good development support if you have a high-end contract. I have used all that, and it is pretty fine. Sometimes, we would find bugs, and they would send us a fix that would get rolled in with the next version. I don't like to be the one that uncovers real bugs, but it has happened.

Support was superior and absolutely wonderful if you could afford it. It is IBM, so if you're in that ecosystem, they expect you to have lots of money and be prepared to let it go.

My first exposure to BPM was with IBM BPM. I had never heard of it before I got the job.

Having used lots of software over my life, I would say this one is pretty much on the complex side. Before the cloud version, it was challenging to make sure you've got the right versions downloaded. They had so many different variants with different licensing agreements, and then the patching has to be done in a particular order. The installation has always felt like a homebrew scripting system rather than a really robust installer. It always felt like if you made one mistake, it might take you an hour to back out of it. It was not a very forgiving and intuitive installation.

I wish it was less expensive. I don't know why their pricing model is so high for a piece of software that could benefit so many. It just seems to me that they could have a lower cost, maybe with fewer features or whatever, but it should be possible to do a lower cost workflow software that uses the same interface and underlying engine but does not cost so much that you have to be a Fortune 50 company to buy it. It is annoying to me. There are a lot of solutions that IBM has that are really powerful but nobody can afford them. They know their business, but I still feel that there are a lot of customers who would benefit from this sort of thing. I don't know what this elitism is all about. I am sure they have people doing the money numbers, but it seems like you can make a lot more money by selling it to way more people for a little bit less.

When it first started, one of the things that were clunky about it was that it was ugly out of the box. It was not a very pretty program. There was a whole ecosystem of people who would do development on top of this IBM business tool, and everybody was coming out with their own toolkits to have a better UI application-wise. That was a real big problem. Towards the end, they bought up something called SPARK UI, and that toolset was significantly prettier and made the applications that you produce with BPM look a lot nicer. There are definitely some improvements there, and they are heading in the right direction.

In my previous organization, we had mostly moved to the cloud. Originally, I was doing server implementation, so we were running everything on AWS and EC2 instances. After that, we moved over to cloud-based stuff. I've been doing IT work for 25 years, and I've always been a get inside and figure out what's going on kind of guy. Personally, for troubleshooting, I don't like the extra layer of abstraction. I like being able to dig in and go right for the logs and see exactly what's happening. I like being able to see exactly what's going on performance-wise. The cloud instances felt a little further away, but on the other hand, I didn't really see any of the performance issues, so there wasn't a lot of troubleshooting to do. Maybe it's just me being old-fashioned, but I do prefer the ability to get in as far as I want to go into troubleshooting. BPM in itself was already running in a big Java instance on IBM, so it was already isolated in the operating system into its own Java Virtual Machine. There were already abstraction issues, but I did enjoy having more detailed access.

IBM has clearly invested a lot of money in making the product robust in developing it. At the same time, as an IT professional within the same career field, it is risky to be a single vendor ecosystem participant. It is really much wiser to have BPM development skills that would transfer to other platforms. I would say don't forget that there are other systems besides IBM BPM to fix automation and workflow challenges.

I would rate IBM BPM a seven of ten. It is really good and powerful, and you can do a lot with it, but its price is hard, and there are challenges using it.

IBM BPM is used for integrations. We are an enterprise application integration team. We integrate most of the companies' integrations and business process modeling.

Our organization has improved by using IBM BPM because our development time has reduced and connectivity improved.

We have had to use Mule as an alternative integration tool because it is more flexible than IBM BPM.

In a future release, the solution should add more APIs. That's why we moved to  Mule. It should not be a drastic change. What we found out is in the new release, of IBM, it has completely changed. I would like my old features to run on the new server so that I don't have to migrate some of the APIs.

I have been using IBM BPM for approximately 15 years.

IBM BPM is a stable solution.

The solution is scalable.

I have used the support from IBM BPM.

I rate the support from IBM BPM a three out of five.

I have used Mule previously.

The initial setup of IBM BPM is complex. 

In the initial stages, we have used consultants for the implementation, but as we have had some experience we are using them less.

Stability is one of the most important features of this solution.

I rate IBM BPM a seven out of ten.

They could provide case studies to investigate and understand the functionality of business processes before development. Additionally, UI needs enhancement in terms of control features.

We have been using IBM BPM for seven years.

I rate the platform’s stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the product’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The technical support team could improve the response time.

Neutral

IBM BPM is easy to deploy. We used the CI/CD method for the product implementation. It enabled automated processes.

The product is expensive considering the hardware and software costs.

We are exploring Camunda at the moment. It is inexpensive and easy to deploy on the cloud compared to IBM BPM.

We leverage IBM BPM to streamline various business processes, primarily focusing on ticket management, loan processing for both business and retail banking, and handling processes related to remittance.

The platform helps us optimize the loan approval process for a local bank. Previously, it required manual work. Now, we can use API features for document scanning.

The feature for workflow management has made a significant impact on efficiency. Additionally, the integration of an Operational Decision Manager (ODM) helps us manage risk and scorecard modeling, particularly in retail banking.

The visibility into processes and performance metrics has significantly benefited our organization. With a clear view of processes through Line of Sight (LOS) and powerful analytics, we've been able to optimize and automate various steps, including the cleanup of automation-generated spam processes.

The integration capabilities have been beneficial for us, particularly with the use of IBM Integration Bus (IIB) and SysTrack for system integration. We can design a robust data-driven model for processes like Nessus for vulnerability scanning.

With features like CollabPress integrated into the cloud-based platform, team members can easily collaborate, share insights, and address tasks in real time.

I rate it a seven out of ten.

The workflow design is the solution's most effective feature.

I suggest establishing a developer forum for better communication and issue resolution. Also, the administration panel could be improved for task management.

I have been working with IBM BPM for the last five years.

I rate the platform's stability a seven. 

We have around 200 IBM users in our organization. I rate the platform's scalability an eight. 

The initial setup process is easy. Although it took time to establish, we have automated many processes.

Following the SDLC can prolong the timeline, but utilizing a DevOps environment can speed up the deployment.

We design independent workflows using Business Process Diagrams (BPD). We identify different roles and entities in various departments and create dummy workflows to visualize these entities and processes.

A dedicated enterprise integration department uses IBM SOA services. We design various services for enterprise applications, including integration with content management systems like IBM FileNet.

Overall, I rate IBM BPM a nine out of ten. 

We currently use IBM BPM in our company to digitize platforms, to ensure that whatever we are currently doing in terms of manual operations, gets digitized. It means that anything a customer needs becomes an STP journey straight through processing instead of requiring any manual work. We chose IBM BPM because of that. I'm the head of enterprise platforms and we're a customer of IBM. 

It has a good user interface and I think the easy add option to build features with deployment in six to eight weeks is one of the key features. Also the add option, being an industry linker, simplifies things with the scale of production and all our production processes.

We place a lot of importance on security and one area they could make improvements in is to definitely increase the vulnerability and security patches to make it more robust and stable. As a financial institution we're always concerned about product and security vulnerabilities, it's an important parameter. The product could be more competitive in terms of cost. 

In a future release, I'd like to see more business related KPIs that can be measured from a digital transformation perspective. If they could build more on analytics reporting and help businesses to derive more benefits out of the solution that would be beneficial. I think they need to probably make it more business friendly and get more insights based on analytics.

Both stability and scalability are fine. I think we have been able to manage the monumental growth of the processes over the last three to four years. It has been pretty encouraging. It's been a success story for us. 

We get very good support from IBM on whatever issues and challenges we have. I think they are very quick to respond. We have a good, healthy relationship with IBM in this regard.

I'm pretty sure licensing is on the pricier side, but it depends on the use case and the benefits that you realize from your investment. There are different versions of the product; a standard edition and an advanced edition. Each is based on the number of PC users, CPU's that you license out, and the cost varies based on your instrumentation and the number of processes.

I have no serious complaints, it's basically the combination of pricing and the security vulnerability that are concerns. I think they also repackage a lot of their products within the new upgraded version of IBM BPM, a BAW - Business Automation Workflow. 

For anyone contemplating using this solution, it's important to study the entire landscape of your business operations. A solution needs to be chosen based on your business needs and there are multiple solutions available. If you're a smaller company, for example, there are other tools like Zing that have less scalability, but it's a reasonable alternative. If you're in the big league, then IBM BPM is the way to go forward.

Our primary use case is moving documents electronically from desk to desk.

The most valuable features come in the bundle, the design process, creating services, creating BPDs, creating coaches, and UI/UX.

I would like to see the user-friendliness improved and the training become free of cost for the solution. I would like to see the front-end support improved because it should be fully integrated and supported.

I have been using IBM BPM for the past three years.

The current system is definitely stable and the database compatibility is very reliable. 

There are over three thousand five hundred users currently implementing IBM BPM and therefore the scalability is excellent.

Technical support is always good.

Positive

The initial setup is definitely complex compared to other market comparatives.

The price is good but could be a little lower.

I would rate IBM BPM an eight on a scale of one to ten.

We use it mainly for ACM. We currently have two projects for e-services. 

I am currently using V5.5.5, but I started with the old version from the content management survey and image survey. I also used V4, V4.5, and V5.1.2.1.2. Currently, we have a cloud deployment, but previously, we had an on-premises deployment.

Its dashboard is easy to use and very good. It allows us to customize.

You must have good experience to work with it. It is not that easy. 

Its installation is complex, especially in the new version for business automation, and it could be improved. It has a safety application embedded inside it, and you need to do a lot of configuration to install it. I have been working for two days to resolve an issue.

I have been using IBM BPM for more than 12 years. 

It is very stable.

It has good scalability. We have many sites. On a big site, we have about 4,000 users. For other sites, we have about 500 or 600 users.

Usually, we provide support for the end users. In case we face some complicated issue and we are unable to solve it, we raise it to IBM. They are very good. We are partners of IBM.

Its installation is complex for the new version.

I would recommend this solution. It is a very good solution, and they are working on improving it in all areas. They are integrating it with Navigator, ACM, FileNet, and many other things.

I would rate IBM BPM an eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature for the organization is the Document Store. It helps us for storing documents for the organization.

The product and environment are very easy to use. With a single click, we can move from the environment into the product.

The issue that we have is with archiving and housekeeping. They don't have a mechanism to achieve processes, data sources, and data. We are currently struggling in this way and would like to get a solution for it.

Having a document viewer would be helpful. As it is now, the system requirements are such that reviewing documents is on a single page. The problem is that with business nowadays is that there are too many requirements.

We have been using IBM BPM for about four years, since 2016.

This is a stable product.

It is a bit difficult to scale.

Sometimes, we face unknown issues. It's our goal to gather information and logs that we need to take. There should be a solution where we can easily monitor what is happening in the system. The system should provide us with a way to implement things such that it is scalable.

We have more than 7,000 users.

Our experience with technical support varies depending on the issue. Sometimes, we get an answer immediately, whereas other times, it takes a while for things to be resolved. For example, recently we had some issues that took seven or eight days to resolve.

The initial setup and deployment are really easy.

This is a good product and I definitely recommend it.

We will be updating to the most recent version next month.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.