IBM BPM Reviews

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.

We use it to architect our core services and business processes. For example, my company is responsible for issuing licenses to oil and gas vendors who operate petrol and gas stations. This is a very complex process starting from submission of the license request to the approval by the minister's office, and then checking the localization policy to see where they can give approval. We use IBM BPM in a plethora of complex processes in different areas of our business.

Initially, the process architecture studio was very helpful and it was compliant with BPMN standards. In the beginning it definitely gave us mileage in terms of business process designing, but nowadays, there are very good and smart tools that have OCR and AI facilities. Currently, the tool looks quite ineffective in a digital transformation environment. We're a mix of proprietary and open source tools, and we don't find IBM very inclusive.

IBM, as a suite, is becoming more and more obsolete because it obliges the customer to buy multiple tools for the same purpose. For example, BPM is only for architecting the business process workflow, and then you need to integrate it with the DataPower solution to bring in the data. There are also other tools for the process mining part that are not a part of BPM. From a business perspective, to achieve one goal we have to license multiple IBM tools on-premise, whereas there are other competitive tools that are assembled and engineered on one platform, and can be utilized in a much simpler and more seamless way. That is why we're finding it very difficult to continue working with the IBM stack. They need to unify the process landscape into one engine.

AI-enabled BPM tools are more relevant these days, where you use artificial intelligence to understand process pitfalls and you apply that in your process design and logic. I would like IBM to consider including AI-enabled process mining, robotic process automation, and very good OCR capabilities from the computer vision side.

I have been working with this solution for five years. 

The stability is good. I would give it a seven out of ten.

The scalability of the solution is high. It's a seven out of ten. 

We have a team of about six people, our business analysis team, who run the solution. There are about 2,000 end users. 

From a user-friendliness perspective, I would rate it as a six out of ten. There was definitely a learning curve to adopt the tool and understand all of its features, but once learned, it was a very good tool for that period of time - about four or five years ago.

Our deployment was done by SBM, Saudi Business Machine, which is the Saudi partner of IBM Global. Our solution designer worked with a business process architect, middleware solution designer, and tool specialists from IBM. There were around eight consultants on the IBM team from different technical backgrounds. Our deployment involved the entire middleware with BPM and DataPower. It took around one and a half years.

Now, our IBM BPM maintenance is outsourced. There is a contract team of three engineers who are maintaining the software because a lot of processes are housed on IBM BPM and the processes need tweaks from time to time.

I would say the ROI is moderate because the license prices are high and the operation and maintenance cost is high. Just like Oracle ERP, you rarely see an ROI, but it becomes intrinsic to your organization. It's the same with any BPM tool. Even if you don't have a very high ROI, somehow you get captivated, locked into the tool.

I would say the ROI is a six out of ten.

The pricing is very high. On a scale of one to ten, if ten is high, I would say it's an eight. The total cost of ownership over a period of time is very high.

It is usually a one-year license. Last time, for a better price, we paid for three years upfront.  

I would rate this solution as a six out of ten.

I suggest that those looking into this tool do proper benchmarking and visit the Gartner and Forrester reports and PeerSpot reports before choosing IBM. Also, if they are going for this tool, it is better to have a strong in-house team for not only deployment, but also utilizing the tool later on.

BPM is one of several IBM products, part of a big platform that we have, which includes BPM, ODM, IIB, MQ, and DataPower Gateway, as well as API Connect. It's a part of a big solution. The idea of this big platform was to go from our old, monolithic development environments that were static, to something that is much more flow-oriented, and much faster to develop.

We are a logistics company, and everything is "events." The old fashion way to solve everything that was event-related was to store it in a database, and use and treat the data once it was in the database. Today, what we want to do - and we are on the verge of doing this with a new product, with a new platform - is to treat the data and to treat the flow as soon as it comes. If it can be automated like in BPM, we do it based on rules because we have them on ODM. The idea is really to treat the data as soon as it comes, and to have exactly the right decision, based on our rules of course. Once we get the information, be as fast as possible. Because in our company, really, delays are money.

We are not yet using BPM in conjunction with Case Manager.

For us, it's really the speed of the decision; the possibility to really automate the decision, based on the rules that you can pre-program.

Its automation.

I already know what is going to come in the next release because we had a discussion with BPM.

Where it can be improved is Integration. I think that the direction that IBM is taking now, to have something that is much more integrated, that can be seen as one single solution, is clearly the right way.

It's stable. We haven't faced any huge issue with it, up to now.

It's scalable. We don't have problems with the scalability. The first prerequisite for it is really to define what the rules are, and the way to use it.

I have been using IBM technical support for about 20 years. In any cases, whether it be for support, in case of a crash, or any other issue, I never had any bad feeling about support. It was fast, and they always had accurate solutions.

I was not personally involved in the initial setup because I am in operations. The initial setup was driven by our architects. However, the environment, as the first shot, was completely done under the guidance of IBM.

In terms of timing of the implementation of BPM, I would have liked to have had it 10 years earlier.

I was not involved in the decision-making process.

If time matters, if your company has a lot of processes that could be automated, BPM is the right solution, definitely.

Primary use case is to process a lot of the workflows for the different companies that we support within the insurance industry.

So far, it's performing really well. We've been migrating everything off an old BPM system into this, to keep it more modern. And so far, so good. It gives us a lot of functionality.

In terms of how it's used as a workflow platform to manage our processes, I can't really talk to that. I'm more on the technical side, I install the product. I don't do any of the development or workflow management pieces of it. I just get it running and make it available so they can use it.

I don't know. Our team doesn't actually use the product. We install it, configure it, set it up.

I think the best way it can be it improved, is to make it easier to install. It's a very complicated piece of software, and there are a lot of things you have to do to get it set up.

It's not just running an installer. You install WebSphere. You install the BPM product, and there's a large host of other steps you have to do: run queries against the database, manually configure a bunch of properties files for your environment. I think if they could streamline all that, so it wasn't a considerable effort to install, that would be very useful. Because from an engineering point of view, you want to spend as little time as possible actually installing a product.

I believe the install was supported by IBM itself. I don't know that we went through a vendor or a partner for that.

Stability seems pretty good. We have quite a bit of work being done on them right now. We had to build out a pretty large system for it, but so far it's been really stable.

Scalability is a little bit tough, but I probably think that has more to do with how we have it set up, as opposed to the product itself.

It's been pretty good. They're really good at providing good feedback, as opposed to a lot of support programs which will actually do their own little run book. They actually listen, more often than not. What little I've had to use them for BPM usually involved the installation step, and I found them really useful for that.

Be sure to thoroughly read the technical documentation on the product first, so you know what you're getting into. When I first had to do it, I just figured I would go to IBM documentation and follow the steps and not read it ahead of time. I realized that it was much more complicated than that, which is why I come back to my earlier statement of make it easier to install.

I think it's incredibly powerful so I give it a solid eight out of 10. Our user base seems to be really happy with it. It's just from the technical side, I'd like it to be a little easier.

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.  

 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.

A good portion of our customers are in the financial services industry, so back office processing related to financial services.

The main benefits would be getting previously undocumented processes under control, improving efficiency, eliminating redundant work, and a few of them being able to achieve some sort of compliance requirement.

Our customers use the solution as a workflow platform to manage their processes. They typically model processes with human and system activities. Then, they use the workflow engine to coordinate those activities making sure work progresses, providing visibility metrics and tracking.

With a regional bank, they used it to update some of their back-end processes for their credit division. It definitely enabled them to change their processes and become more efficient.

We have used it in conjunction with operational decision manager, in several cases.

• Visualizing the process.
• Quickly build a solution.

Better integration with other products in the automation suite; easier to integrate with IBM's Operational Decision Manager and content management system.

It is stable.

Scalability is very good provided you bear it in mind during implementation phase. It's possible to do bad things that will affect you later with scalability.

The initial setup is fairly complex. Luckily, we have a few people in our company that know how to do it. It is just a question of having the right resources.

We implemented the solution at the right time for our company and customers.

Our customers do see ROI. They'll identify some particularly painful or uncoordinated processes to start with, then build out from there, picking off low hanging fruit.

We are purely IBM. However, we do run into Pega BPM when we are evaluating BPM solutions.

I would recommend IBM BPM.

It comes down to the speed of implementation: How fast can we build something which our customers can use in their business and run with.

Our customers use it as a workflow management platform for processes. We have a wide range of customers in terms of the types of processes. We've worked with a couple of the very large accounting firms on, for example, tax calculations for commercial clients. Think of it as TurboTax, but for commercial customers.

We also have onboarding use cases - every BPM product out there just supports onboarding. We have several of those types of use cases as well.

The vision of what BPM can bring to our clients to be able to manage workflow quickly, efficiently, and to get visibility, that's what the IBM suite provides us.

Agility is the key. It gives our customers a faster way to be able to implement processes, get ownership of task, visibility into a process. The ability to modify that process, optimize that process over time, is probably the biggest benefit that they get from the software.

It gives us, as a partner, a lot of options for building on additional capabilities that we see customers asking for time and time again. It's a very open model for adding in toolkits or functionality on top of the overall BPM platform.

BPM has always had this challenge: It had this promise to enable non-technical users, business people. That is an area where we, as a business partner, and other business partners, continue to build new tools that sit on top of BPM, to push that level of engagement further and further out to the business side. That's an area that still needs to be improved.

Also, we would like to see integration with artificial intelligence, machine learning-type of technical capabilities. Right now, there are a lot Watson libraries out there. Building those integrations more, out-of-the-box, from IBM would be a good direction.

It is a consistently stable product. IBM BPM has come a long way from its original Lombardi days, to coming into IBM and the rewriting of the overall framework, to the way the UIs work. Where it is today, it's quite an enterprise-level product.

We use it across the board for what IBM labels smaller clients, commercial clients, all the way to enterprise clients. It's like any software package. Scalability is built into it, but it doesn't always come automatically. There is a lot of expertise that we use in performance-tuning it. There are times when, if you have a tremendous number of API calls, there's some tweaking that should happen to optimize that. But it's all configurable. There are things that you can tune to make it enterprise-capable, based on your use case.

Tech support is an area that could be improved. What we've seen over the years is that they had better support in the past than they do now. They're a little slower to respond; that could be based on the resources that are available to IBM.

Setup is a little more complex. But with the support of platforms on cloud, we love that, our customers love it. This becomes so much easier. We provision an environment and now we start building business processes or the application immediately. We don't worry about configuration.

Installation for on-prem used to be a one-time activity for engagement. And we may not even mentor a customer on that, because all they really care about is building processes. With the cloud, it becomes just a push of a button to provision it.