IBM BPM Reviews

UI is amazing for development, and ever since they adopted responsive UI the implementation is easier to adjust on demand.

BPM has become a backbone of our organization, handling major processes. It not only automated the key processes but also highlighted areas that require improvement and acceleration points.

Though I am quite satisfied with the product, and especially the introduction of responsive UI, I still believe that the overall development environment must be desktop based rather web based.

Since 2009.

None.

None.

The Process Portal provides access to most heritage capabilities and introduces many new features, such as a mobile-ready user interface, the ability to edit and share saved searches, and support for federated environments.

Simple processes and automation.

Business areas.

I have used various versions of this product: v6.2, v7.0, v7.5, v8.5, v8.5.6, and v8.5.7.

No.

No.

• Very easy test management
• Good import/export features
• Very good JIRA integration
• Great customer support
• Good report templates, which are very easy to use.

• Shortened time for test management 
• Saved time in QA team communication and collaboration

• Import/export of attachments 
• Transfer of attachments to/from JIRA

Three years.

Not at the moment.

Not at the moment.

Currently, I am using the latest cloud version on my current project. On previous projects, I have used in-house solution.

• The functionality to design UI to be responsive and can run on multiple devices. 
• Exposing of the process components as REST API: This enables consumers to easily integrate and get information on processes and their data.

Helps automate processes, also it easily manages and tracks the business processes. It has the ability to have a view of the performance on each process so you can identify the possibility of optimisation.

Integration with web services, especially in the standard version of the product.

More than three years.

Yes, on the Process Center (development environment), especially when you have too many developers working on it. Then, it becomes unstable.

Not at the moment. It is quite easily scalable.

• Compliance with the BPMN 2.0 standard
• Great out-of-the-box ECM integration
• Small learning curve
• Superb version control

It allowed us visibility of key business processes. At the same time, it leveraged the capabilities required for spotting and making improvements in conjunction with BI tools that the company already had.

The new web-based IDE has plenty of room for improvement. The constant switch between Eclipse and its web versions can be annoying and confusing.

More than five years.

In general terms, the platform is stable. Though lately, we've had many issues after installing the most recent fixpacks (Cumulative Fix 2017.06). This is something we were not used to.

From a system architecture point of view, the product is quite robust; deploying applications, adding/removing nodes, load balancing, and recovery mechanisms are tasks well supported by the technologies upon which IBM BPM is built.

Process Modelling, simulation and optimization, integration, UI components.

I have had the opportunity to work with various organizations that can be categorized as medium to large scale. Was able to successfully deliver process optimization and system integrations that helped the customer increase their ROI and improve their process performance many times over.

User Interface components could be further refined to enhance and extend customizations dictated by end clients.

Nine years.

No.

Highly scalable, product offer two flavors: Standard and Advanced. Both these versions can be customized to support high-availability, scalable servers.

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.

• Process diagram in process designer
• Task management
• Process instance progress stages
• Dashboard and view
• Process portal and process manager

Good for managing tasks and it has also helped save revenue.

Faster task loading to groups and users is needed.

I've used it for six months.

No, it's very easy and can be deployed in less than 15 minutes.

Yes, sometimes there is a latency with the tasks flow, based on the table space.

Not in terms of users, but in terms of tasks there were issues.

7/10.

8/10.

We previously used Tibco BPM.

It was a little complex.

We used a team from IBM to implement the solution.

7/10.

We also evaluated Tibco BPM.

It is a good product for task management and task allocations.

WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus – our main focus was to implement integration across a bunch of systems interacting separately with each other. In this context, IBM’s service bus came up to be good candidate for reducing the amount of relations between distributed systems. This feature has proved itself as a more or less easy to be set-up, tuned and customized for the specific company means.

WebSphere Process Server – while dealing with the problem of systems integration there often arises an opportunity to incorporate some company-specific business processes to the service bus. In case when a business process requires responses from a number of systems, requests to a number of systems to get some reference information or even some sort of human workflow to receive approval, etc. – then such processes may be implemented within one solid medium being able to interact with each and every system using specific adapters.

This product was able to decrease the amount of relations between distributed systems and isolate systems, letting them retrieve and send information having only access to ESB.

I've been using it for two to three months for evaluation.

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010

• Development simplicity
• Transparency from a monitoring perspective

It allowed us to automate some important logistic-related business processes.

• Scalability
• Performance

I've been using Lombardi Teamworks from 2009 until the present. However development of new features stopped in 2011.

There were issues with the blue/green deployment model, specifically old instances of BPM processes that didn’t handle correctly with new revisions of the same processes.

Yes, but they were related to issues with our underlying infrastructure component like application servers or databases.

Yes, unfortunately the event manager component of Lombardi didn’t scale well, so that became our bottleneck.

9/10

We didn’t have a BPM before, but now we use Oracle.

It was a mix of a vendor team and in-house team. All members were new to BPM so we started from scratch, but we've managed to develop some best practices.