IBM BPM Reviews

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.

We do claims processing and BPM is the product that we use to have the member ID's and codes added to it.

Process Portal is where most of our business users log in and complete their work, that's the main use of interface. 

We don't use it in conjunction with IBM Case Manager or any other IBM information product.

It is helpful in processing at least 200K claims, so during open enrollment it's huge for our company.

It saves a lot of manual work, a lot of data entry work. That's how it has positively impacted our processes.

The workflows, and using them to process the claims and send files back.

It will be good to have the RPA. I learned that that's coming up, the workflows are going to have RPA in them, so I'm looking forward to that.

Except for the Lucene the index - we had a couple of issues in the Process Portal where the Lucene index went out of sync, and we had to work at least 15 - 20 hours to have it back in sync with the database. So that was big for us last year. 

If that's improved, or if that's removed, or if there is a workaround for the Lucene index issue, that would be great. 

Scalability is good. We are looking into rolling out BPM for newer projects as well. I can't say we are seeing an ROI from being able to scale with it.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. We worked directly with IBM.

I rate it a nine out of 10. It's not a 10 because of the Lucene index issue. That cost us a lot of efforts in the production environment.

It's a good solution in terms of stability and processing and response. We haven't ventured much on the other features that IBM BPM gives, like Business Space and Business Process Choreographer. I think other than the Process Portal issue, the other things are good.

We use IBM BPM for banking transactions. 

The tool's workflow function is very strong. 

IBM BPM should become cloud-native. It should also add a cloud deployment feature. 

I have been using the product for ten years. 

I rate IBM BPM's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten. My company has 1000 users. 

IBM BPM's support is good. 

The tool's deployment is complex. 

Integrators helped us with deployment. 

I rate the tool's pricing a seven out of ten. 

We have used it for e-office. We have done a unification in a shared service center for our procurement activities and payment, and we have rolled out almost 180 processes.

We were on version 8.6, and we have recently upgraded to Business Automation Workflow (BAW).

Its workflow and integration with SAP are the most valuable features. It is also a stable solution.

We are a government organization, and we are the largest government power sector in India. We generate around 30% of power in India. Therefore, our processes are quite complex. Although IBM BPM is a low-code or no-code software, if you want to have extremely complex workflows, just the business process diagrams are not helpful in creating those workflows. While implementing complex workflows, only the process flow diagrams did not help us. We had to write a lot of Java scripts and Java queries to achieve what we wanted. 

Its integration capabilities with the SAP environment have to be improved. At present, we are only talking at the web services environment level. Its price also needs to be improved. It is currently expensive.

Previously, Active Directory required a heterogeneous environment, but now they want a homogeneous environment. We had onboarded employees through Microsoft Active Directory, and now I have to implement Microsoft AD only from the cloud for my vendors.

I have been using this solution for more than two years.

It is definitely stable. It comes from the IBM stack, so it is a stable solution, but the stability also depends on the partner who is developing your IBM BPM solutions. There could be issues if your partner has not written the artifacts or the business process diagrams properly or the checks and balances are not proper. IBM BPM interfaces with so many things. It interfaces with middleware, ECM repository, SAP, etc. Therefore, all the checks and balances have to be properly coded. Otherwise, certain problems or errors will keep on cropping up. You require really good developers who can develop these kinds of solutions.

Because it is an on-prem solution, we had initially provisioned sufficient cores and storage. It is at an enterprise scale with the data center and the disaster recovery center. So, we can scale up, and there are no problems. We have already done it. 

We have around 15,000 users of this solution.

IBM is managing our solutions.

Its price is on the higher side, and it can be improved. Its licensing is on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs. 

I would recommend this solution to others. It is a good solution. The only thing is that you should have a good technical team to implement it before embarking on this journey. It is not an easy solution.

I would rate IBM BPM an eight out of ten.

It is an on-premises solution that helped us automate business processes like onboarding customers, loan management, loan approval, and leave approval.

The features allow you to connect, and things work seamlessly. The coding and the maps are also valuable. I feel good about the features, and its beauty is that anybody can design it.

I have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

IBM BPM is stable, but sometimes there are issues with the server. I am unsure if the issue is due to the VAS server or the BPM, but there was some instability when we went through a few of the final enrollments.

We could not proceed with any scalability due to some business decisions.

I have not contacted IBM Technical Support for IBM BPM. I have only engaged with support through forums and the blocks.

Positive

The setup is straightforward. However, the debugging was not straightforward.

Deployment was also quick and not complicated. I was not part of the deployment team, but I believe we used an integrator for deployment.

In terms of licensing, we have to make it free for the developers so more people can install and use it. It is important to make at least licensing free to try in the cloud, not just for IBM BPM but for any of the IBM products.

This can help companies start to push through solutions and proposals. For example, licensing could be free, providing developers something to try in the cloud. Because there are regular audits in all companies when you install, some companies may see this as harmful. Therefore, a provision to try it free on the cloud can increase the number of skilled PA developers.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We're looking at automating and digitizing our processes. There are two use cases. One is centralization of account opening. That has been out there for just over a year. 

The second process that we picked is the consumer loans process, the loan approval process, the whole loan application. The loan application process has just been automated, so it's been there for about two or three months.That is what has been put on the BPM tool.

So we use it primarily for managing the workflow of the loan application or of account opening for a new customer who walks into one of the branches.

So far, the tool is fantastic. The challenge has been for our people, I think the ability to realize that the tool is only as good as the thought that you put behind it. So what my team ended up doing was using the existing process and putting it on the tool. Based on that, now they've realized that using the tool means there is an opportunity to rethink the process itself, as well. That's what we're going to go through. But the tool itself, the experience was fantastic.

We're not using it in conjunction with any other IBM products. This is a standalone application that we're using.

In terms of the process automation and the workflow improvement, although, as I said earlier, we did not re-engineer the process, just the fact that there are lots of times when there is back-and-forth between the branch staff and the back office staff. So all of that, now that it is all automated on the workflow, has significantly reduced the turnaround time for the loan application. Previously, if it used to take anywhere between 10 to 12 days on average, now it takes between two to three days on average.

There is a component of this BPM pool - I can't recall the name. What it does is, it allows you to create various scenarios and then run them quickly, before actually putting them onto a tool. So I think that part of the tool is really fantastic, because that enables you to create scenarios, create simulations, before actually going out and putting it into the tool itself.

At this point, we're still going through the process of exploring the features that we have. I think we're far from the stage where we can talk about new features.

So far, we have not put huge volumes onto it, so it's been working fine. I am not sure how it will behave when we put really large volumes onto it.

We will be scaling it up, especially on the account opening side, because we do end up opening about a couple of a million accounts a year. So yes, we will be putting it to scale and we'll be seeing how it goes.

So far, we've been doing it in a couple of hundred branches, we wanted to do it in a controlled manner. But starting in about the second quarter this year is when we're going to put it to test on a mass scale and we'll see how it goes.

In terms of scaling, it's not like you can see the return on investment in hard dollar terms, but just the fact that from a customer experience perspective, if you can turn it around in two days instead of 10 days, by default, that should hopefully translate into more loans that we book, better customer experience, and better word out there in the market. Obviously, you can't put a dollar value to that itself.

The technical team was fully involved in the process, and it was a fantastic experience.

I wasn't involved in the setup personally, but my team members were involved in it. I have seen the tool itself. It wasn't that complex. I think it required a little bit of programming understanding, but by and large it was reasonably easy to use.

We worked directly with IBM itself. They're the ones we deal with. We are the largest client for IBM in Pakistan, so IBM works with us directly.

Regarding when we implemented it, we should have started a few years ago. It's automation, digitization. I think the earlier you do, the better it is.

I think it's worth looking at the IBM BPM solution. Certainly, when it comes in combination with the other tool that I talked about, where you can do a simulation, I think it's worth it. One should certainly look at it.

The most valuable feature of the solution is IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation and how it's integrated with case management and the RPA and all these things with flexible deployment.

UI is an area with a shortcoming that needs improvement.

I have been using IBM BPM for six and a half to seven years. We're currently working on a migration project from IBM BPM Version 8.5.7 to IBM BPM Version 21.0.3. My current company is a platinum partner for IBM.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

It's a very scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

In my current environment, the solution has more than 500 users.

I rate the technical support a seven or eight out of ten. Sometimes IBM support takes a long time to respond or responds wrongly on some issues, and there is some fixed practice at their end because of which they take some time to come. Hence, I lean more toward seven.

Neutral

I rate the setup a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy. If you are using the UI to do the installation or setup, the rating would be nine. But if you're using shell commands on AIX or Linux, I think it should be almost two or three since I did the shell commands for the services. It also included some server performance tuning and stuff, like, database connections for BPM databases and all such things. It's not easy.

Since I am working in the banking industry, the tool is deployed on-premises.

The deployment takes around two days since there is a need to prepare a development environment.

One person can do deployment with help from a database person. Some database scripts should be deployed on Oracle or Db2.

On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the pricing a ten. It is an expensive product compared to other tools.

I evaluated options like Appian, OpenText AppWorks, and Pega. However, I prefer IBM BPM over other solutions owing to its level of integration and the already existing adapters, and how it is easy to create your files to be connected with IBM BPM.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We use IBM BPM for marketing. We use a lot of processes on IBM BPM at the bank.

In my Organization, we have a lot of business cases to bring to the BPM Platform. We bring all most workflow like ATM Operation, Loan process for Business Banking and Retail banking.

Some of the features that I like the most are team management and process performance. They are both very useful and very powerful with regard to the workflow.

It's a stable solution and can easily be deployed.

Some of the features are not enough for my business. We need to build custom user management for the many end users affected by BPM.

For IBM BPM, we have half a million users with their own processes in IBM BPM. Currently, we have a lot of processes, and we have a lot of custom groups for the onsite user to look at and run on their groups. When we add a lot of users at the same time to a group, the process admin is not enough for this, and we need to use the custom interface to do it. So, there are some issues with scalability.

The cost is higher in comparison to that of Camunda, for example.

I've been using IBM BPM for a year.

We are currently on-premises but hope to have a cloud version as well. We have a lot of processes that may need to be run on-premises and on the cloud. We hope to use Amazon AWS for the hybrid cloud services.

The stability is good at present.

We have had some issues with scalability. Currently, we have a lot of processes, and we have a lot of custom groups for the onsite user to look at and run on their groups. When we add a lot of users at the same time to a group, the process admin is not enough for this, and we need to use the custom interface to do it.

We currently have about 5000 users and may increase to 6000 to 7000 users next year. The users are member staff and managers.

The customer support has been fine with IBM.

We have used LinuxONE, but we have a lot of solutions related to IBM. We chose IBM BPM for the sake of consistency.

We didn't have any big issues with the network deployment.

We needed two people for the deployment.

We have in-house and also use some vendors for development. If the rate is level 1 to 10 I think I will rate for 6. 

I already compared some solutions related to business process management, and I saw that the cost of IBM BPM is more expensive compared with that of Camunda, for example.

We also pay for support.

Before choosing This solution We already create a business case to compare some Enterprise Solution. Have Page, Cammuda, IBM BPM

If you follow good business processes, I think that IBM BPM on-premises is a good choice. It's a good solution, and I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.