IBM BPM Reviews

I'm a consultant. We are working for a consulting company, and we initiate solutions in IBM BPM at the moment, mostly for banks.

Overall, I'm satisfied with the product. It has a lot of capabilities and potential. 

This is technology, and there's always room for improvement. It would be better to have a single solution. Trying to have an overview in terms of this solution brings together the concepts of BPM processes, customer journeys, and an automation part for KPIs. All of this working together and coming up with a single solution with privacy is more commercial than anything else.

Because when you try and initiate things, we see that it's two different applications. But there's an effort to combine all of these applications and have an overview of internal processes. I believe they are making investments in this part, but they are probably delayed a bit.

Adding a control app or something easier in terms of maintaining the versioning will help. Make it easier to manage the patches so you can just do it and move on to the next one. Every time we tried to meet to do some upgrade of a version of the solution, it was a lot of work. Even minor upgrades always required a significant amount of work in intensities and trials.

From our side and our core customers, we didn't get any complaints.

Depending on the geographical area you're in, depending on the relevance of your customer, and if it's a big customer, the support goes very well. We don't have many complaints. If it's a smaller client in a smaller country, sometimes the support is delayed a bit, and we get some pushing from their side to make sure that we have a proper response.

We also have projects in our systems and projects with Comunda, and we are doing some parallelly. We also have some experience in using the BPMO methods and Software AG. It's not great, but for small things, it does the trick in terms of the licenses model. Sometimes depending on the situation, it becomes much more interesting for some of our clients.

The initial setup is kind of a pain when compared with other solutions like Comunda, which is more or less like plug-and-play and quite easy. The solution is quite quick in terms of IBM, and it's a bit more complex. Especially if you're talking about having a more enterprise environment, it becomes a bit complex. You have to configure a lot of additional components from that infrastructure to make sure it's running okay, and sometimes it becomes a bit complex.

It's expensive. All software is always extremely high. The manufacturing cost that we have compared to the selling cost, it's not like you're building a house or building a car. But putting that aside, considering that it's expensive, it's a lot of money. If you compare it with some of the other alternatives in the market, it's a similar price. For instance, if you compare it with Pegasystems, it's a similar price.

If you're talking about smaller companies or smaller clients, probably they're going for something more simple like Comunda or something else because it's much cheaper. Even the support becomes much cheaper than getting a full IBM BPM solution. 

If you're a very big company or a bank or don't want any headaches, you would probably prefer IBM. You know the old saying that no one has ever been fired for buying IBM. It's one of those things, and that rule still applies. 

I would advise potential users to get proper training and figure out the most suitable version that they need. Because in terms of internal versions and support, they need to be careful. Like all software, the latest versions always include some bugs. Older versions lack some support. You need to be careful about that. 

Have a proper solution architect that knows enough about the BPM system's ins and outs to make sure that you have proper internal support in terms of projects. Apart from that, try to build a close relationship with the vendor.

People who come from different technology backgrounds have some difficulty getting used to working with IBM products. If you compare it with other products, it's probably not as easygoing or as simple to implement as the rest. But after you get used to it, it works.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give IBM BPM an eight.

We do use not the BPM alone; we use the BPM with the ODM and the BPM with the RPI from IBM too, which is Automation Anywhere. So we have a lot of pieces connect to accelerate the process. We have a business process to open accounts and a workflow from open accounts to transfers. The transfers include internal transfers and international transfers.  We have a business process to open accounts and a workflow from open accounts to transfers. The transfers include internal transfers and international transfers. We have about 60 processes, including nine complex processes implemented. We also have 20 ad-hoc processes. We created these processes in about a month.

The process is important. The processing functionality makes it easy to change processes and workflows easily. This is useful as our business is in constant transformation and is constantly changing. We have an internal team that knows the product well regarding BMP, and we do not often need the intervention or further support of IBM.

This is one of the best tools to support the business and the way we work, and the numerous processes we need to implement.

IBM could improve the price. It is far too expensive. It would also be useful to be able to implement the product more quickly. The front end is not customised for a good user experience. It does not have an amicable interface.

We started using IBM BPM seven years ago.

IBM BPM can be scaled up and down to various layers. At the highest level, the solution is implemented quickly and suits our purpose. Lower levels provide more functions but take longer to implement.

When there are issues with the product, we need to raise a case with IBM, but the turnaround time for support requests is very long. However, generally, we don't have that many issues with the product.

We improved the setup process, but it can still take between 2 to 6 months to complete an implementation. If there are any issues, it can take up to a year to complete. It is a complex process.

It would be best if you chose the correct partner for implementation. If you don't use a partner with the correct knowledge and the implementation goes wrong, you need to re-implement, and it is a very time-consuming process. The implementation should ideally not be used as a learning process. We found this out by experience as we once had a partner with little experience, and as a result, a lot of errors occurred within the implementation. This cost a lot of time to resolve. We use an experienced integrator now to assist with the process.

It is a very expensive product.

It's a robust technology, able to support a lot of processes so that users can use it in a large group processing environment. I don't customers use the latest version. The latest version, 6.0, has been out for 2 to 3 months, but there have been many problems with it. It is best to use a mature version in the market, which is well established.  

We are doing a lot of transaction processing for 401ks, moving processes out of a legacy workflow system into IBM BPM.

Our workflow processes are initiated from the web. They will start a process on the back-end, and move throughout all the steps necessary to process distributions, loans, and relevant transactional work. 

We started with Process Server, even before IBM BPM, so it was 2006 to 2007. When IBM bought Lombardi, we converted over. So, it has been quite a while.

It has improved my organization quite a bit. It brought awareness to what our business processes are, even to the business side, who did not necessarily know what they are.

There are a lot of things that you get out-of-the-box: Timers and so on, which took a lot of effort and code before.

It is being able to see the process, and understanding what the process is versus having to bury it in code somewhere. 

Better reporting. I do not think that we are fully taking advantage of what it already has yet.

I have an interest around the robotic piece, and integrating that with the processes. I think that is certainly a good direction to be going. 

So far, it is stable. We do not have a ton of processes moved over yet, but the ones we do have seem to be working pretty well.

We still have a lot to move to figure it out.

I have not had to deal with that side of things. We do not have anything that is down, so I am guessing technical support must be doing okay.

We have a different area that works with getting everything built up and installed. The migration process sometimes is a little bit hairy going from one version of a progress to another. Other people take care of it, so I do not have to worry about it.

It is a pretty good product. It does everything we need it to do.

We've been using BPM for most of the enrollment process, for banking, infrastructure, the financial side. So we've been using BPM to improve our business management process.

Performance so far has been pretty good. We've been using for almost five years now. A lot of auditing is in there, so we're pretty good with it.

We will be using the automation product, that's a new version, I think. These are new things we just learned about it. So we'll be discussing that more now.

The audit functionality.

IBM BPM has had an impact on our ability to change or update our processes in a good way. We have improved our process with it.

The business process management, where we can avoid lot of paperwork.

I'm more on the infrastructure side, not on the development side of it. So I'm not sure I can answer this. It's scalable right now from the infrastructure perspective. But I'm not sure of the development side of it. I'm not a developer.

The latest versions have been more stable. Initially, we were using older versions. With the latest version it is more stable.

It's pretty good. I would rate it eight or nine out of 10.

I'm not sure if we've seen ROI as a result of implementing BPM.

It's pretty good. We've been on calls with IBM. We have a technical account manager, so it's pretty good. I can almost rate it 10 out of 10. Good relationship.

Mainly for auditing purposes, and security concerns. That's why we started using the BPM tool.

When looking at vendors, we do a PoC with them to find out their support structure, etc.

I was not involved in the initial setup. It was done in-house.

Right now we're looking at BP3.

On the infrastructure side, I'd rate this a 10 out of 10.

I would recommend this solution, it's a pretty stable, good environment and platform for business process management. 

The use cases include security and network processing for internal purposes.

It streamlines processes, benefits other projects, and integrates with other solutions.

I appreciate its high user capacity and standard compliance. It's also helpful for multi-project deployments, design assessments, and general deployment processes.

Integration is a big plus for me.

There is room for improvement in the stability. 

I have been using it for ten years. I work with the latest version. 

Overall, I would rate the stability an eight out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. We have below 100 end users in our company. 

The customer service and support are good. They are responsive. 

The configuration and installation are easy. The deployment took around one to two days. 

The deployment began with an assessment, followed by requirement confirmation and sign-off by various stakeholders. We deployed it on the cloud and managed the process internally.

We only needed two people for the deployment. 

We have a yearly licensing model. It is not expensive. There are no addition costs to the standard license. 

Overall, I would rate the product an eight out of ten. I would recommend using this solution. 

It is easy to use, good price, is easy for developers, easy to install and configure.

Previously, our company's business automation process was slow. IBM BPM's schedule and response functionalities are excellent. So, our customers are happy with it. We implement the solution for our customers.

My clients utilize IBM BPM for various business processes, ranging from correspondence management and vacation requests to expedited legal cases and numerous committee meetings. There are countless use cases in which IBM BPM proves to be a valuable tool for my clients.

Our customers have experienced a lot of benefits. So now, they have automation in place to implement internally or externally in their environment. This has enhanced the customer experience and made it good. The product has many BPM tools, which help eliminate bits of work. Also, information is now available and accessible according to their security or role in their businesses. They can now increase their process in the Middle East. They also do manual work using the tool. The tool also helps them ensure that they are able to follow policy compliance. In short, the tool helps in a digital transformation, and so IBM BPM increases the efficiency of our clients. All of the aforementioned reasons increase the revenue of our clients and our company.

Customers find the tool's capability to scan and compare it with other products in the market to be valuable. As a top business process management technology, it is comparable to the cloud-based automation tool BAO, which appears to be a fusion of two solutions, IBM BPM and IBM Case Manager. Customers can cover their work-related issues, or problems can be covered with IBM BPM. Customers can streamline their operations and automate certain processes while managing their security. So I believe there are a lot of advantages one can reap using the tool.

Currently, the tool's interface is created using a forklift upgrade, which is proving unhelpful. I hope IBM uses something from IBM Content Navigator to make the interface easier to navigate.

In the past, IBM BPM has worked on certain features to make it a container solution.

I have been using IBM BPM for four to five years. I work as a system implementer for IBM. Also, I am using the solution's latest version. We have a lot of customers using it since it is an affordable tool.

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

It is a scalable solution that can be scaled up or scaled down, including the components or processes of IBM BPM.

Our company handles ten customers using the tool.

The technical support of the solution is excellent.

The level of complexity involved in setting up the system depends on whether the business processes are simple or highly complex. Based on our experiences, we deal with the complex setup required for complex business processes. Our team has gained valuable experience in implementing the product and handling complexities with the help of our customer support.

The tool's deployment model depends on the country where customers are located.

The product itself has a feature to take care of the deployment process.

During the deployment process, the first stage involves development, distinction, and protection. In the second stage, servers are deployed on nodes. As someone from the development side, I do not handle the deployment myself. Instead, we install the solutions and configure the environment on our customers' dashboards. After that, we can deploy our solutions or applications on top of it.

We only need a few people to carry out the deployment process.

The maintenance and deployment of the solution are very easy. Also, installation of the latest release is an easy process.

I think it's a reasonably priced tool, but it's important to consider which customers should buy this solution. It's designed for enterprise customers, not small ones. Small customers may opt for another solution, a small one, or a resource. However, it's a reasonable tool for enterprise customers, especially for governance purposes in their space. Also, according to IBM's policies, the cost of the solution will increase as the need for it grows. Therefore, the cost varies for different companies. We have been working with many solutions for over 25 years, and we have a lot of enterprise customers in Saudi Arabia. Some of our customers have been with us for 25 years.

I would tell those planning to use the solution that they need to start using it gradually over time before scaling up to achieve the best value from the product. They can eventually implement or automate all of their systems. For me, it is one of the best products globally. Over the years, IBM has been able to merge two solutions into one. For Business processes or integrations and to deal with whatever issues customers face, IBM BPM can help to automate such business processes. Overall, I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

I am a Solution Architect and I support both cloud and on-premise versions of IBM BPM. I use the solution for banking applications, such as account opening, fund transfers, corporate and credit limit approval process. In the insurance sector, digitalization, underwriting, life insurance claim settlement process, and vehicle claim settlement process. 

This solution has always been lacking in the user interface (UI), it needed to be improved a lot. However, from the acquisition of Spark UI, the UI is much better. Overall the solution is robust and has the ability to integrate with any product for complex workflows.

IBM BPM integrated with Spark UI and the UI is now much better, but they still need to improve the UI because competitors have predefined templates and other additional features. In these competitor's solutions, you are able to use the templates, map your data, and the form is ready to use. With this solution, you need to write a lot of code to have the same quality as the competitor's templates. It would be a benefit to make this platform more towards low-code or no-code. 

The REST web service integration needs to improve by providing other features, such as different security options.

In an upcoming release, they should add video calling capabilities to the solution. I work mainly in the Middle Eastern market and many of the bank companies use video Know-Your-Customer (KYC) to call the customer directly from the BPM tool. They do this for customer verification, such as document and identity authentications. Additionally, every organization at some point would like to send out letters to their customers, for example, welcome letters, but there is no easy way to do it with this IBM BPM. There needs to be a template available or an attachable generated PDF document that can be made easily within this solution.

I have been using this solution for approximately 10 years.

This solution is very stable. When looking at all the features reliability is one of the strongest points of this solution. It has greater scalability and stability compared to the other competitors, such as Appian.

The scalability is really good. The scalability of IBM BPM is one of the best in the market because you can scale seamlessly. You can add any number of user licenses, CPU cores, or other components.

Most of the customers I have are enterprise companies using this solution.

The support is not very good. When we raise the Problem Management Report (PMR) for any support, they usually take a long time to respond. They tend to ask a lot of questions instead of evaluating the system themselves by doing screen sharing sessions or other troubleshooting evaluations. There are times when we finally get a response from support but the solution they gave is not helpful and the issue remains.

I rate IBM BPM customer support as seven out of ten.

I have been using this solution for a long time and for me the setup is not difficult. However, it is a little complex if it is your first time or when you compare it to competitors. The length of time it takes to do the setup depends on the hardware environment, but it typically does not take very long.

The price of the solution is fair for an enterprise solution that has both cloud and on-premise deployments and when comparing to competitors. Recently IBM has introduced Cloud Pak which allows for more flexible licensing options for automation and other features.

I have evaluated Appian.

I rate IBM BPM a nine out of ten.

 It is perferct if you have to develop complex apps without much coding (only java script). It is also good if you don't have much IT resurces in your company and woudl like to involve business analysts in process of developing apps. My opinion is that no it stuff can do about 50% of all developers work.

If you have a company that doesn't like to have everything ready out of the box and likes the capability of customizing a solution, you'll probably have a problem with this solution. You will need to do customizations on process portal, on your BPM applications ...

If you want to use IBM BPM, you will have to invest a lot of money for licenses and you need to learn that there are limitations in developing applications. You cannot create anything you want. You need to follow all the rules that IBM BPM requires.

For example: you cannot implement modern programming techniques (OOP), microservise architecture. You have services, you have a graphical tool for creating solutions, however, you cannot use this part of the code in other apps freely if you don't use toolkits and it can be sometimes very tricky. 

There are some things that the solution needs to improve upon from a developer's perspective. Software developers that use the eclipse process designer in older versions of BPM have had issues. The eclipse process designer and web process designer are quite different. With a web process designer, they cannot use IntelliSense during the coding in JavaScript. They cannot use some functionalities that weere in previous versions.

From the client's perspective, there are problems with licensing. It is complex especially when you need to do upgrade from old to new version. You will  need to use VPC instead of PVU per core and it is confusing. 

In case we are talking about cloud pack for automation it is good idea and it shoud be the future of automation of business processes but it is not ready yet. There are some functionalities that are missing ( for exampe sql services).I epxect that it will be solved soon.

I've been using the solution for more than ten years. I started with the very old versions, with BPEL processes and then swich to BPMN.

The solution is extremely stable. IBM is a reliable product. There aren't issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The solution can scale well. It's already quite sizeable and it's designed for larger organizations.

We actually give technical support to our clients directly.

I do have some technical support experience with some of IBM's technical support team, especially in relation to the setup, installation, and upgrade. I needed their help during installation and the response was okay. I'd say that I am satisfied with the level of support.

I am using also Camunda. It is an open-source BPM and I can make a parallel between these two tools. Therefore, if you want to create new apps and you have experiance software developers and have resources, and you don't wish to pay licences then it will be better for you to create a business process apps using open-source.  If you woudl like to create your services and your UI in some external tools, like Java. .NET, Angular, .. it is possible in camunda and it is not easy to achive in IBM BPM. On other hand if you don't have IT resources and you woud like to create apps faster then use IBM BPM.

The solution is complex to set up. However, you expect this going in. It is a huge application. It is running on a WebSphere Application Server. The WebSphere Application Server is an application server, and therefore, you need to set up this application server first and then to set up the BPM solution. After that, you need to create profiles and so on. There are multiple and sizable parts to the implementation that have some very problematic steps. On top of that, if some error is happening with these steps, we will have a problem. 

On the other hand, you really have a huge and powerful tool at the end. Therefore, you cannot expect the tool will have a simple setup or simple installation and to have all this functionality that you get with IBM BPM, especially with IBM Business Automation Workflow that you ultimately have.

Basically, for first installation and customization of one small dev, test and prod environment  you will not need more than a week.

If you have old version of BPM and olready finished some appps, and you need to upgrade it, then it is a bit more complex, due to the fact that you will probably have problems with the application if these applications are developed in an older version of BPM. Instead of only upgrading software, you will need to convert the application and sometimes it could need some time.

IBM BPM is not for every company. This is a solution is for a company that has at least 500 people and more employees. I don't expect a company with only 100 people to invest a half-million dollars into the licensing and the same in the services. A company like that should look into other open-source options.

We're just customers. We are not partners. We don't have any business relationship with IBM.

I started with the very old versions, with only BPEL processes. It was also BPM, however, I was using BPEL processes

Right now, for the latest client, we are using the business automation workflow 19.0.0.3.

Our clients are mostly in the banking industry, and therefore we don't really deal with the cloud versions.

IBM is preparing some new tools specific only for the banking industry and for the cloud. I don't much about it but I'm sure that it will be presented soon.

Basically, if you company is large, has problem with IT resources, need to rapidly change business processes and to fast create new apps IBM BPM will do your job.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. They can still improve their software. They have some parts missing and I'm expecting that these parts will be upgraded in the future. It is not a full 10 now, as there are somethings that they need to improve on.