Oracle BPM Reviews

We mainly use this solution as a business processor management system. We use this solution to develop internal documentation including our customer internal agreements and verification of contractors. We also use it for internal company orders and intellectual property management.

Oracle BPM is not used directly by our customers. It is a tool for developers. Oracle tried to make it a tool for business users too but from our point of view, this positioning is wrong. For example, one of the critical features that is not working well enough, is migration of processes when you deploy a new version of processes.

Every time we roll out a new version of processes, we have to migrate to a new process. The process of this migration was not very smooth. We later decided that it would be easier for us to stop all processes, deploy a new version and then restart. 

We use our own interfaces because the standard interface was not sufficient for our customers. We tried the business rules, but after some time, we stopped using them. Right now it's mainly the process management functionality that we use.

I have been using this solution for six years. 

This is a very stable solution.

The scalability of this solution depends on your architecture. The processor management system is quite fast and scalable. We have 10 developers using this solution and it supports 25,000 users.

We consulted a few times with local Oracle support. In some cases, they were able to assist us. In other cases, they gave direction where most customers find the answers. 

I am not very happy with customer support, but it's not the worst that I have experienced.

Neutral

The initial setup is not very easy, as with most of Oracle's products. Some aspects of the setup were not very clear and it took a lot of time to solve challenges. Setting up the system took one week  but we had to come back and change settings many times.

This solution is very expensive. You are charged per license and an additional 20% for support. 

This is a solution with many features that work really well. It is stable. Oracle misjudged how users will use this product and are trying to fix it using Oracle Process Cloud. I would advise others to look for a cloud version if possible.

Oracle BPM will require you to do a lot of development. If you don't have a strong team of developers and administrators, I would not recommend this solution. It is a complex and very powerful solution for people who know what they're doing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We position Oracle BPM Suite as central process implementation and documentation platform, where the automation part is the more important one. With process automation media breaches can be avoided, business become more agile as well as transparent and existing process can become more efficiently.

The tool gives us capabilities to significantly increase the transparency regarding business processes and their corresponding executions.

In addition, Oracle BPM Suite allows Business and IT teams to talk about the same things, the business processes, and allows collaboration to document, implement, and optimize the corresponding models.

One of the most valuable features of the solution is the capability to allow the implementation of static processes, using the standard BPMN 2.0 notation, and also to address not straightforward, dynamic process scenarios, by providing features for Case Management (Adaptive Case Management, ACM).

To increase the transparency of the execution models to the overall business processes, BPM Suite provides capabilities to document and model the corresponding high-level business processes (Enterprise Map and Value Chains) and the definition of respective KPIs. This can be done using a lightweight, browser-based tool (BPM Composer). With this, it is basically possible to keep and visualize the big picture, which is often missing when doing BPM projects.

In addition, the platform comes with a very solid foundation, which also allows for the implementation of consistent integrated service base.

The capabilities for building consistent integrative solutions, coming with a broad spectrum of connectivity adapters to integrate with third party enterprise information systems, is key for building flexible BPM applications.

Support for Decision Modelling Notation (DMN). There is a Business Rule Engine available, but this is not DMN-compatible.

No.

No.

The level of technical support is satisfactory. It depends highly on the affected components and on the way the error can be described, and on what information can be provided.

There is also a lot of documentation available. The development community is also responsive and provides a lot of information in the form of blog posts, webcasts, and presentations.

No.

How complex the initial setup is depends on the requirements.

If you need a highly available, clustered solution (Multiple Nodes), then it's more complex than only creating a single node instance.

If you do it for the first time, it seems to be very complex, but there's documentation available (Enterprise Deployment Guide), which describes the needed setup steps on a very detailed level.

It is necessary to evaluate the requirements regarding platform usage and the main operation area of the platform. A topology blueprint should be created and validated against the following questions:

• How many instances do you expect per day/month/year?
• What is the average amount of data?
• Should the environment have High Availability?
• What kind of integrations/processes will you have - stateless or stateful, long running processes derived from the requirements, and evaluated at the very beginning?

Depending on that, the sizing for the environments should be done.

Yes, Camunda BPM, IBM Process Server, and Appian.

Collecting requirements and being clear what is needed is key to creating a scalable, robust, and future-oriented environment.

Oracle BPM Suite can be used to automate parts of a company's business processes to increase operational efficiency. In addition, the high-level business processes and KPIs, which are important for specific processes, can be documented. But, without a clear, integrated service architecture, BPM cannot be implemented successfully. You have to think about your processes, on the one hand, and on the needed functionalities provided as Services, based on data from the backend systems.

To ensure robustness and easy changeability of the developed services and components, my recommendation is to set up a Continuous Integration (CI) environment as a first step in every project.

The CI environment is the central platform for automated test executions as well as for deployment automation and is needed to ensure development efficiency and agility with respect to changes in existing components.

As a last point, I would like to mention that BPM Suite needs a proper operation concept. It is essential to maintain the platform. You should also think of retention times for the runtime data and which information needs to be kept, e.g., to comply with legal regulations.

Oracle BPM is a whole development platform (stack) used to create your BPM application. It is well-integrated with WebLogic Server and JDeveloper as IDE is for development. Of course, all of this is quite complex, but once you get it, it is very powerful.

The default Workspace does not meet all our needs and sometimes you need to create your own custom Workspace.

Alternatively, you can customize it, but you can hardly find examples for it.

More than five years.

On par with other enterprise supports.

Just standard web applications.

The learning curve is steep, but it is a complex technology.

Oracle has changed its licensing policy and incentivises for you to select Oracle Cloud over other cloud providers, which sometimes might not be what you want.

When starting a project, get at least one super-experienced consultant to draft your architecture and project plan. Once you have the vertical slice, you can replicate it for the different processes you need.

The integration of the solution is very good with other Oracle products.

The solution needs to offer better integration with third-party systems.

The solution should focus more support towards new department methods that assist with the architecture of the deployment itself.

I've been using the solution for 12 years.

From a BPM perspective, the stability is fine, but it depends on how the database is installed.

Scalability is okay, but it depends on the configuration of the setup. We have customers that have users on the system that range from 10-20 users all the way up to 200-300 users.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We use the on-premises deployment model and work with various versions of the solution.

For customers with an already existing market footprint, I'd recommend the solution. For those that don't, I'd suggest Cloud Pack Automation.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

• Very solid implementation of BPMN 2.0 standards, in all its aspects.
• It has developmental accelerators, which allow for virtually any customization needs which you may require.
• That it is Java based is definitely a plus, in our view.
• It has a rich out-of-the-box feature set.

We built solutions based on this product in pretty much all domains, from retail to banking and finance, communications and utilities, and various industries (namely, the aerospace industry), as well as public sector, from applications, which deal mainly with approval processes and auditing needs, to a full blown Service Management ERP for a large retailer.

Their Case Management set of features is severely lacking and should be a target for immediate improvement dealing with unpredictable processes inside of organizations.

We’ve been using this with our customers for the past seven years. We've been using the 12c version for the past three years.

We had quite a few problems regarding stability, namely in the 11g version. From 12c onwards, we registered a significant quality hike with the latest incarnations being very stable.

No. We have customers generating more than 150,000 processes per day without performance issues.

Technical support is an Achilles' heel for all Oracle products, and this is no exception. It takes forever (several months) to have an issue resolved.

Yes, we used Microsoft technology-based process platforms, such as K2 and Captaris Workflow, but they just didn’t cope with standards (BPMN 2.0) and were particularly weak when you needed a full-fledged, all guns blazing solution.

Setup process improved immensely with the 12c version, and it’s very well documented. No issues.

As with all Oracle products, the licensing over VMware is an issue. You have to license the whole hardware, not just the amount of CPUs you actually use. I would suggest to go to Oracle VM if you need to virtualize this platform.

Also, check the current Oracle process-based platform in the cloud (Oracle Process Cloud Service), as it may serve your needs, and it’s much cheaper to start and run.

Yes. IBM BPM, Appian, K2, and Captaris.

Get a few guys very good an Oracle’s application server suite of products, namely WebLogic, as well as good Oracle DBAs. They will ensure very good platform health and no technical issues with the product.

The database access feature is valuable for us.

It has not improved the way we work in our organization.

The operations and credit analysis areas need to be improved.

We have been using the product for less than a month.

We had stability issues. We found several issues in the development and production environments.

Not applicable.

I would rate the technical support at a four out of 10.

We switched solutions because we wanted a solution which provides agile flexibility in our credit process.

Oracle solutions are highly priced when compared to competitors.

We did not evaluate any alternative solutions.

Evaluate any other solutions first. Oracle BPM has a lack of vision and is very complex to develop and maintain. Support is also very expensive.