IBM BPM Reviews

Two things are valuable:

• The system integration layer is valuable because this enables an organization to create a single point where all the key organizational master data is held in different IT applications across different functions, that can be accessed and updated.
• Process orchestration allows an organization to model and execute its business processes across functions rather than operating in functional silos; this works hand-in-hand with the system integration layer.

On top of this, the business rule engine and common user interface allow centralization of any of the organizational parameters and a common corporate interface.

It enabled the development of a new safety critical equipment testing database and the integration of this with the inventory management system and the asset management system. As more systems are integrated, this solution enables a spider web (network) of the business processes so as to develop over time, creating greater levels of efficiency and effectiveness.

The product has developed considerably since I have used it. At that time, the use of system integration alongside the business process orchestration was cutting edge. Now, there are many more mature offerings including IBM BPM. I believe that the integration work was more difficult than anticipated at the time. Also, the product was orientated towards using other IBM technologies such as their IBM Db2 database technology; the solution didn’t play well with the Microsoft SQL Server and there was a stand-off between the two vendors blaming each other for performance issues.

I have mainly used IBM Blueworks Live (as an analyst) and worked with BPM developers who have used the BPMS solution to implement designs, i.e., for about a year.

There were performance issues with the solution, which were related to the IBM – Microsoft interaction (as described above). The browser-based solution does not work well at facilities that do not have reasonably fast networks. This would not be an issue now as easily available data bandwidth has increased dramatically since then.

The solution was probably overkill for the initial application, so I did not experience any scalability issues.

IBM put together a package which included the onsite consultants who were very effective. Apart from the IBM – Microsoft issue, the support was good. I expect that IBM BPM can play with the other server and database technologies much more effectively now.

This was a new venture into the Business Process Management.

The setup was quite complex because the solution was cutting-edge at that time and IBM invested considerably in the implementation, likely at a loss to themselves.

I don’t have information about the IBM BPM licensing but the process discovery tool, i.e., IBM Blueworks Live has three levels of licenses: Editor, Contributor, and Viewer (there is also a Community Member license but I don’t know what that is for). The Editor licenses are for around £80 per user per month. The Collaborator licenses are very valuable for increasing BPM maturity by enabling the stakeholders (particularly the process managers) to collaborate on the process capture and design. Blueworks does not allow a free HTML publishing option, but instead, a Viewer license is required which is relatively inexpensive but has to be bought in packages of 500 licenses. However, it may be cheaper for organizations to pay for the Viewer licenses that are immediately up and running in the cloud, rather than paying for someone to administer publishing to an intranet.

I believe that a Hitachi product was evaluated as part of the tender.

Start with the IBM Blueworks Live to get your house in order first. This is an inexpensive way of introducing BPM governance to an organization and it naturally leads to a BPMS deployment when the stakeholders recognize that the process models that are presented can be automated and the underlying data integrated across the organization.

We're primarily using the solution for workflows, mostly. We are a telco-based company, however, most of our use cases are kind of in a workflow format. We're trying to workflow things across other systems.

The installation was straightforward.

For us, we had the challenge whereby the training was not done properly through a sales partner. The BPM has a partner to deliver, and with our local partner, the training was not properly done, so we were not very comfortable. We never got to a comfort level with the product. We ended up not using it that much. There were missing modules within it. For example, the document management part was missing and we failed to integrate it into our SharePoint. In the end, there was no uptake for the processes that we had put in through it.

The solution as a whole should be simplified due to the fact that it has so many paths. It's difficult for a customer, when you are onboarding this system, to understand all the parts that you have to put together. 

What you buy depends on what you know about it. For example, if it's supposed to then have BlueX and a separate document management platform like FileNet, and a process server and a processing center, decision center, you kind of have to put these things together. And yet, you don't know them due to the fact that you are not an IBM expert. It's not like you can say, "Look, I want in a BPM solution." And then it just comes with everything together.

They should incorporate an API gateway functionality within it to simplify integrations. One of the key issues with IBM, BPM is the integration part. It is not very flexible with integration. For an automation platform, you really need easy integration. If I am going into SharePoint, if I'm going into ERP, those are some of the key things that you have to integrate into. We were doing point-to-point integrations. Within the system, the API gateway and the integration management should be part of the solution.

I've probably been using the solution for two years at this point.

The stability was likely okay. For us, we had issues, however, I don't think it's the platform, which caused the problem. It was likely the expertise in terms of the actual deployment.

The company licensed at the PVU level and the scalability is a bit complex. You can't really tie it to the processes that you are putting in. You always have to monitor at a system or hardware level, the impact that you're putting on it - the more you customize and add things on it. It's a bit difficult to know when to scale up or down.

Originally, we wanted it to be used by at least 1,000 plus users, with the potential, depending on the process that you've put in, of more. We would've wanted to end up hosting process automation for processes to be used across 5,000 plus users, potentially. Unfortunately, we didn't get the adoption rate we were looking for.

Technical support was okay. We didn't really have any issues with their level of assistance.

We didn't previously use a different solution. It was mostly just acquired Shadow IT.

While the installation of the solution itself was straightforward, the customization wasn't straightforward for us. It was too complex, and the training we received did not help us understand the solution. We needed to be experts and we weren't.

We used a consultant to assist us with the process. We did not handle the entire process in-house.

The licensing is a bit expensive for a main process automation platform. Maybe it's because of our background, however, we found it to be a bit pricey.

We were just end-users and customers of IBM.

It's hard to rate the solution as we didn't really get to use it. I would likely rate it at a seven out of ten - if it was installed correctly.

If I learned anything from the experience, it's the importance of proper training. A company really should get proper IBM training to understand the product first, before committing to purchasing and implementing it.

We are changing the major database in our financial sector. We moving to a paperless process and added a risk engine to make the decision for each loan. 

We use it to evaluate each loan. We have people doing the evaluation of each loan and use BPM to accelerate the process by having metrics between tracking points. We are use validation on the screens to avoid errors. 

We are also using ODM and Avast Enterprise Business services. 

• It controls the risk. 
• We reduced the PCL (credit losses).
• Its efficiency in reducing costs. 
• We are going from a paper to a paperless process.

In the future, we would like to reduce the resources used to manage the process. 

Controlling the operation. We have metrics about fraud, risks, etc. 

We like that it does not require a lot of hours to train our people. 

More customization. We like to customize the screens to show more things related to our company. Customization is very important for us; the complexity to build a solution. We need to make changes quickly, and sometimes the IBM team is very slow with the product evolution or changes to the tool. 

It is performing very well. We are building the solution right now and launching in August.

We are moving to this tool because we have more than 40,000 transactions a month, and we would like to triple this amount. 

Our next step is to scale and change the repayment process.

The technical support is very good. We are with an IBM partner.

We contact technical support because sometimes we have problems with our IBM servers failing. The support is always responsive in fixing the issue.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was complex. It is not always easy to launch a new platform and it needed better coordination with IBM.

We worked with a business partner to implement the solution. We worked with a business partner because they know how to implement solutions in each market. I am from Latin America, and this partner knows our market. Four years ago, I worked with IBM New York and it was difficult to apply these market solutions in Latin American. However, with this partner, they are aware of our market in Peru. 

Start with a PoC. Do small changes, then take a step back and grow with the platform.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Experience, teamwork, and resolution, because any project has its complications. We want a partner who will resolve these problems quickly. 

Mostly for business orchestrations, and developing the process applications within Wells Fargo Advisors, and we have other lines of business like retirement, wealth, etc. So we basically build the process models for all the internal back-office operations.

We started four years ago with one or two process apps, but now we've got close to 40. So that's a lot of incremental development in the last three years.

We have a legacy product, called MQ Workflow, and we developed so many process apps using that tool, but we migrated everything to BPM three years ago. The best part is the orchestration simplicity. However, we do have some issues, but, as we work on those challenges, I think overall, product-wise, it is pretty good.

I checked out a session, here at the Think 2018 conference. They basically merged the old BPM with the Case Manager, PFS, etc. That's pretty good, but we need to figure out how we can better use the Case Manager and PFS with that existing business flow.

It is pretty much stable. We had some hiccups in the beginning, because of the product learning curve. But once we got the environment stabilized, we have hardly seen problems, from a BPM standpoint. We do have other components like, the LDAP and databases, and the ASM F5 Web tier, but from a BPM product standpoint, I think it's pretty good.

It's scalable. We started with three nodes on day one. We expanded to five nodes, then we basically had two other engines, so we have about 15 now.

But there is a limit. There is a point where you stop, you can't scale anymore to improve the performance. But for now, I think we are okay.

We have engagement, whenever there is an issue we open a ticket with IBM, depending on the severity, whether it's two, three, sometimes one, if production is down. The people who we work with are pretty responsible, most of the time. Again, not every time, but when it comes to the production and management, I think we get good response.

We do have a liaison between Wells Fargo and IBM who takes care of high-priority tasks with Wells Fargo. They escalate, sometimes it goes to labs, level 2. We don't see any problems where nobody is looking at it and we're struggling, nothing like that. People are helping.

I think we had some assistance from IBM, for a few months. After that, in-house, we pretty much took care of handling it.

I would rate BPM an eight out of 10. Again, this is all from my infrastructure platform support standpoint. We do have a lot of application development, testing teams, QA teams, they also interact with the BPM product. But my job is more platform topology, architecture.

The most valuable feature of IBM BPM is the low code design, and ease of maintenance. Additionally, the integration is good and easy to do.

IBM BPM can improve the dashboards and reports. It only has two dashboards, and reporting is very difficult to build.

I have been using IBM BPM for approximately five years.

IBM BPM is a stable solution.

The scalability of IBM BPM is good. It's easy to add features and applications to the platform.

I have approximately 10 customers, with each having an average of approximately 300 users.

The support for IBM BPM is good.

I have not used other solutions in this category.

The initial setup of IBM BPM is easy to do. The implementation time depends on the business that the solution is being put into. It typically takes six months to one year to complete the process. For a deployment that is easy, the process could take only a few hours.

We have two to three administrators that support IBM BPM.

My advice to others is this is a good solution and they can find a lot of advantages. I recommend this solution to many users.

I rate IBM BPM an eight out of ten.

We were using IBM BPM as part of our business automation solution. It was used to assist in automation during our RPA implementation. 

IBM BPM is stable.

We didn't do a more thorough investigation to figure out which features were missing. We just decided to go with a more programmatical approach.

We only used IBM BPM for a very short time—something like a year—and we decommissioned it already.

I cannot say how scalable IBM BPM is. It was stable, but we did not need to scale it. We have 7,000 employees total. However, since the solution is automated, there are no actual users — just automated tasks. So it would be equivalent to 10 or 15 users or something like that.

We probably contacted IBM support at some point in time, but we had no issue with BPM. 

We had been using Drools for some other BPM implementations.

We had a yearly license. I believe that if the license were cheaper, it would have a greater impact.

I rate IBM BPM seven out of 10. I would say it's an option to consider, but I wouldn't recommend it since we've switched to another tool.

My primary use case is to take a lot of the business processes from the client portfolio and smoothly, seamlessly transfer it over into a solution for them to grow their business. The key ideas are to eliminate a lot of the proprietary footprint in development and try to seamlessly go with their business logic in a framework, which we have developed, and be able to mitigate a lot of the risk and to make the front-end interaction with the customer optimal.

We use the solution as a workflow platform to manage processes. It really gets into understanding the business logic of the clients, seeing how closely that aligns with the frameworks that we've built out in the BPM portfolio, and keeping that locked into the solution.

In some of our use cases, we have used it in conjunction with IBM Case Manager and other IBM automation products.

Having good experience with the portfolio of IBM products, we have the capability of leveraging them, and part of our practice is to take our clients through the journey, very specifically mapping out the approach for each client. We don't have a niche solution, but rather we are true partners, much like we find with the IBM portfolio of products. We are true partners in leveraging only those which are relevant, applicable, and can add a progressive value. A lot of times, we want to give them the leadership but we base that upon rock-solid capabilities of the delivery in the IBM portfolio.

As an example of the impact on a customer's ability to change or update processes, one customer, in particular, wanted to link the front-end through the enterprise. The BPM solution frameworks that we were able to provide them through the IBM portfolio, they have enabled them to lock in from the back-end processes through the middleware to the front-end, so they can go to market and sell their company.

It has a mature delivery already spec'd out with almost global applicability through IBM's many customers, and being able to put that on it. It helps maintain, and in many instances, lower costs, as well as to maintain those costs, keeping them stable. It mitigates a lot of the risk of scaling to the enterprise. It also gives the best possible customer experience for that particular client.

If you're trying to lower and contain your costs or mitigate a lot of risk, there is nothing like the IBM Cloud. It can take on the security and regulatory risks.

I would like to see a lot more case studies. 

I'd like to see a lot more of the partners who've adopted these solutions come forward and demonstrate themselves. We have done this in the past where we had our clients at the IBM Think events interconnect, come forward and say, "This is what we've done with Miracle and IBM," and make that presentation known. I'd like to see a lot more of that available on a case by case basis. 

I'd like to see a lot more of the partners come forward and talk about how various partners have assisted them rather than just this is what it is and this is what it can do. Nothing like kicking the tires after you've bought it. Understand where the value is.

The product has been well-orchestrated and proven. Through a lot of our own blood, sweat, and tears in terms of our frameworks, we've been able to validate them in every instance.

Because we try to understand the full enterprise, whether it's an SMB or a larger organization, we already have the scalability understood, and we've already taken a look at that architecture, we've taken a look at the delivery. The scalability is part of what we deliver as a company, in terms of the thought leadership, which is all hallmarked on the IBM product like that we're able to leverage.

Everything is complex. There's no easy-peasy. Intelligent process automation becomes a complex matter. Most people are terrified of moving from their on-prem into the automation and digital transformation. 

We often times will map out according to what we've done in the industry. There is nothing simple, everything is very focused on a true partnership with our customer base.

We demonstrate ROI even before we go on. We show it to our clients from our understanding of the business assessments, expectations, and objectives. We then transcribe that into our technical solution, in which we portray and show them the ROI, from the user base from day one. Then, they can understand what they will realize in terms of time and in terms of growth.

Competing solutions are SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle.

With IBM, you have only a few roadmaps, and I think that's the value of IBM.

Stay as close as you can to what the current business model is; don't try to reinvent or recreate it. Just because it has appeal on all the buzzwords and new technologies, stay with what you've currently done and utilize that in each incremental stage.

I always like to have an early start. I find early adopters to be amongst the best proponents. In every case, I would like to get in earlier.

I'd like to see a lot more partners come forward in the present. This is where IBM has stepped forward previously and helped me in our world.

Most of the use cases are for fraud investigations and managing the cases. We also use it regarding account opening. It's all related to financial services and banking, so it's all about account opening, fraud investigations, KYC, pretty much around the financial services processes.

We use it for workflow management. For example, when the customer requests opening of an account, they reach out to the customer and they initiate the process. Then it goes through the KYC process and it comes to the account executives to determine whether they are eligible to open the account. And of course, there would be a career check as well. So that workflow is actually implemented very well using BPM.

At this moment we are not using it in conjunction with IBM Case Manager or any other IBM automation products.

It has been used in multiple LOBs and a lot of benefits have been identified. There is a good return on investment, because some of them were using paper-based processing, and introducing BPM has actually improved the time involved.

Regarding any impact on our ability to change or update processes, as I said, most of the paper-based work was converted into an automated workflow process, and some of them were converted into straight-through processing, with no human interaction involved whatsoever.

The UI-based workflow, where a lot of human interactions are involved.

It's a bit technical, related to the instance of migrations. It's a tough thing to handle, in every new release, in every upgrade, that we have to do things in the applications or in the product. I think IBM is working on it but I know there are a lot of requests coming in from different organizations on this. 

Stability is pretty good. Many users, concurrent users especially, are using the application built on BPM, so it is good.

We did have multiple setups where the system was scaled to have more users when there was an expansion.

We do use them often, in terms of working with product-based issues or product-relevant problems. 

We have received good response whenever we engage IBM support for issues. We did get some help from IBM support on some of the BPM-related issues, even though they were not relevant to product. Certain kinds of consultations were answered.

I would say clients prefer to go with IBM, versus competitors, because of the support, and product releases, upgrades or updates or new features that come up very often, in the last couple of years. That has improved compared to two or three years ago.

I would say it's medium-complex. It's not highly complex but, yes, since there are a lot of integrations, it's kind of complex.

As I was explaining elsewhere in this review, regarding the paper-based workflow, there were multiple business professionals involved, but now, with BPM, they actually do not work on paper, they do everything online. So they do better work than just filling the paper or processing it.

Pega, obviously, is currently one of the main competitors to IBM BPM. I think Pega is actually doing pretty well compared to IBM currently, and I think IBM RPA should do well going forward.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor include looking at 

• the licensing cost, obviously
• the infrastructure needed
• scalability
• resiliency of the product
• the enterprise direction, where they are headed. 

Most of the time, time to market is also a consideration. IBM BPM does these pretty well.