IBM BPM Reviews

We use this solution for business workflow automation.

It is a a very powerful solution.

It is not user-friendly and requires a knowledgeable and skilled user to work with it. If an end-user has no idea about the technology, they will have difficulties. The product requires the end user to be skilled with prerequisites and have the ability to configure and tailor the product to express the workflow. Most IBM products in layer seven, middleware or the application layer, are not user-friendly.

The workflow is also difficult. In any organization, many departments are involved in the workflow from the start to the end of the procedure. That's why we must be aware of an organization's manual process to reflect it in the product. The product could ask the user questions, and based on the answers, it can develop the workflow, which makes it much easier.

We have been using this solution for more than 12 years. It is deployed on private cloud.

It is a stable and powerful solution.

It is a scalable solution, and one small company that is a customer uses this solution. They do tender development proposal evaluations for clients.

The initial setup was easy but using it after became a bit challenging. Deployment took about one day, and we are a big organization.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. I would advise others to compare IBM BPM with other equivalent products in the market before deciding.

It provides a very robust environment to build an integration framework or workflow patterns that we have. A lot of changes or modifications have been made to this solution over the past few years. The features that they have added this time have helped developers like us to work on the developmental environment and leverage all the capabilities of the tool. This is what I like about this solution.

The coaches and the user interface are the areas that can be improved a lot. It is good in terms of data processing, but the UI, scripting, and coaches are not very user-friendly and developer-friendly. Performance is always an issue. The scripting and the pattern that it uses are very tedious for new developers to understand, and it takes time to master it in depth.

When comparing IBM BPM with IBM APN, a lot of things are provided out of the box in IBM APN. We don't have to write code or a Java connector to make a functionality work. It would be very helpful and time-saving for developers if IBM BPM is improved in this area to provide many functionalities or drag-and-drop options so that the developers don't have to write the code.

I have been using this solution for eight years. I have been involved with this tool since the beginning. It was called Lombardi before it was taken over by IBM. I've seen how this solution has progressed in the last few years. 

I don't have much experience with their technical support.

It is straightforward.

I would recommend IBM BPM to others depending on the use case that they are planning to implement and the actual specification they are looking for. If they are focusing more on user interfaces, I would not recommend IBM BPM, but if they are focusing more on workflows, integration designs, and straightforward processing, IBM BPM would be a good choice.

I would rate IBM BPM a seven out of ten.

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.

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.

It allows for model-driven development, easy to use drag and drop type configuration, integrations, reporting, etc.

The main business benefits, at the highest level, are to improve the customer experience and operational efficiency. Sometimes, you can't do one without the other. I am trying to improve how customers interact with organizations. These days, everybody has many channels through which they arrive. For example, even in this day and age, a lot of very large companies have siloed operations across channels, which leads to a disjointed customer experience.

We use it as a client workflow platform, because it is designed for improving client-facing and internal processes. There are other uses for the platform: rapid application development, low code development, and high performance application.

As soon as you go live, you have a bunch of changes right on the back of it. Those changes will go live in two to four weeks. It will continue to keep up with the changing needs of the business. That is the strong value proposition of BPM. It's not a one-time automation.

The user experience, while it has improved, should continue to improve. It should stay on that trajectory. These days, we are all spoiled by applications, like Amazon and Facebook, and stuff we are using in our day-to-day lives. We expect the same experience from enterprise applications as we do from consumer applications. Some of the companies which are leading the charge have minimized the gap of customer experience from consumer to enterprise. IBM and its BPM platform is moving in this direction. It still need to improve, but it's getting there.

It is very stable right now. We have seen nothing but amazing results over the last six years.

I have yet to come across a use case where scalability was an issue. 

We don't use their support. We have our own IBM experts who are certified and have years of experience.

The initial setup is very quick. 

Most of our projects take about three people and are done in three months.

BPM is good when used for the right use cases. I will not use BPM for a trading desk that's making split-second decisions because that is not the right use case for it. When you use it for the right use cases (e.g., a loan origination process for a bank, claims processing for an insurance company, or a healthcare provider accepting a claim and settling it), processes which typically range from hours to weeks, then when you apply BPM, you bring the processes down by an order of magnitude to minutes to hours, respectively. Those are the right use cases for BPM. There's no performance issue if you use it the right way. 

Our customer continue to use the product over time, which is the best indicator that they are seeing ROI from the product. 

It has a low cost to implement. You'll get your money back in the same year that you complete the project. 

One of its competitors is Appium.

If you're not leveraging these types of technologies, you're missing out.

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.