IBM Business Automation Workflow Reviews

We are IBM partners and I'm an enterprise architect.

This product is tightly integrated with the RPA automation process which has a lot of good features. They have recently made some enhancements and added new features. 

There are several areas where improvements could be made including with engagement of OCR capabilities. We currently need to write a lot of customization code and I think if that could be reduced it would improve performance. A similar solution like Pega doesn't require that level of code writing.  

I've been using this solution for 11 years. 

The solution is stable. IBM leads when it comes to automation.

The customer service is very good, we're happy with it. 

Compare to other solutions, the licensing costs are reasonable. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

My company is a gold partner with IBM and implement this solution for our clients. At the moment, we have two projects that are using this solution. One is using the solution for asset and green management for wheat in Egypt. We have four hundred silos. Each has its own process for loading and discharging the wheat to the mill - this is all managed with IBM BAW. Our headquarters also uses BAW to manage wheat transfers.

The low-code interface allows us to focus on the business and the rules. But, even though it is low-code, we are able to customize it via JavaScript.

This is a low-code software where you can just drag and drop on the user interface. There are also a lot of quality integrations such as TMS.

The SCADA Systems are very sophisticated and have a hard time integrating with our older scales.

The technical support in regards to the partner side needs some improvement.

I have been working with this solution for three and a half years.

This is a stable solution that we have been able to use as a distributed system. Each silo works independently and updates are all pushed to the cloud. In the event that there is a shortage in communication, the silo is able to operate completely independently from the headquarters.

This is a very scalable solution.

The technical support based upon the licenses for the client is very professional, dedicated, and very fast.

We are still working on the initial setup. we are in the first stage which is deploying our most important silos (twenty to twenty one of the four hundred total). The whole process will take us about eight months for all four hundred. We have support engineers that are available on-site 24/7 for the first stage, from there, everything will be managed remotely. 

There are between eight and ten engineers working on this product for the development, four to sic system administrators/database engineers, plus roughly twenty team members for QC/QA.

Licensing varies by use-case.

I would rate this solution an eight our of ten.

Our primary use case is completely banking driven. We select the account to open, determine the complimenting and storage core, cooperate on their calls, do analysis for the core customer, uphold compliance policy and anti money laundering payments, and all the functions we define in the process.

Currently, we are using it on-premises with a roadmap for into the cloud. We call that the private cloud, because this is a bank space so we are not going to the public cloud due to regulations and compliance policy.

The features that we have found most notable are similar to what we have with IBM BPM. Because we have done the automation so that when a document comes from the customer as a soft copy, there is an optical character reader ensuring that the data will be integrated with the BPM. We thought of the human interaction, checking everything, and you can create a case file identification like in BPM.

From the optimization perspective, this is better than what we have currently with BPM where we are also doing automation. We can move where the cash mechanism and the external cash mechanism are, where we put the cluster to a policy, where the service will be available. Even when service fails, it will be taken within a cluster of seconds, as things are on the optimization solution provided by the BAW.

Other improvements include a couple of reusable artifacts. These were not there with BPM and now BAW provides that.

We've got a list of features that feed from IBM. We get them on a weekly basis in the subscriptions. These are the benefits we are getting from IBM - small snapshots level, how you are going to deploy automation, integrated data set ups. That is a pipeline where you can do automation, the process for operational specifications, where it goes to the end-to-end automation process level.

A lot depends upon the customer. Let's say a customer wants to get a good system where you can crop in and automate the process, that feature was not available in IBM. So we spoke to them and they released the setup for tax availability for BAW. We are working on features based on our requirement specifications.

IBM Business Automation Workflow is a new solution that we implemented four months ago. 

This is a new product, so we are getting a couple of bugs on the product level. We have spoken to IBM and it's up to the product vendor to provide product complications, like deployment snapshots and where we have automation in the process. We keep talking to the IBM guys to write a PMR and get it refurnished. 

We use the auto-scaling mechanism. So maybe the volume is too high for utilization and we use the load balancing, distributing the load balancing to multi-use cloud packages. We use that for the availability.

The solution is being used country-wide. That means five to eight million people use it on a daily basis. Globally, we implemented it for the National Bank because it exists across all the countries and all the 128 branches in the different countries.

In terms of scalability, we have implemented auto-scaling. There are on-premises flows, and on-prem/cloud users, and settings on the IBM cloud.

Customer service is good. It's the leader from a customer service perspective.

Before using BAW, I was using BPM for development, designing architecture, and providing a solution for the automation workflow process. I worked on automation without manual interactions.

The initial setup is actually a really complicated process. We did the proper enterprise access to the server. Then we have the front desk, principal, policies, standard regulations, practice assessments, and the architecture, then with the business IT, the whole concept is complex.

We have two types of set ups, micro-services and services in the interaction section. For the services in the interaction section we use the IBM Integration but for the micro-services we use IBM Connect.

We don't have other costs, except for license and support. If you buy the software you can get one year support free of cost. When it is upgrading the PMR and product level issues, there are technical discussions with the vendors. So those things are free of cost provided by the vendors.

We evaluated a couple of vendors like Pega, and Oracle BPM. We evaluated four vendors. We choose IBM at end of the day for their support team, costs, and availability. These factors are a concern for a vendor from a traceability metric perspective. We chose IBM since it is available for implementation and we already have an agreement with them as partners.

IBM Business Automation Workflow is a good tool provided you can use it cross-platform where there are a lot of features. Another good thing, which other products, like Pega and Oracle don't have, is that it is a very optimizing solution providing the IBM BPM process orchestration.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give IBM Business Automation Workflow a nine. 

Since I have been working with multiple vendors on multiple projects in the billion dollar  project range, I see that it works for end-to-end functionality.

It provides a solution for integration orchestration. This solution is for any organization in the banking, telecommunications, healthcare, manufacturing, and all domains and industries.

We are working in the banking industry. The bank has a data lake and they make use of the dashboards and reporting to access and work with their data.

The ability to connect between BAW processes and robotic processes is very useful.

The UA features in the framework are very good. It promotes reusability, which is an advantage for us.

The dashboards are helpful because you can display reports directly on your screen.

We are having a problem because we want to migrate to the cloud, but it necessitates using the Red Hat OpenShift platform.

Sometimes, we feel like we are not getting the full features of the content management capabilities. We find that some of the small players like NewGen and Documentum are doing a better job at this.

It is difficult to integrate with FileNet. It is already bundled and they are now using automatic integration, but it is lacking in usability.

We want something that is more platform-independent. For example, using the scanner application, we have to use a thick client. Even though we have a content analyzer, in some cases, we first scan with a thick client and then replace it with a thin client.

I have been working with IBM BPM systems for the past 20 years.

This is a scalable product.

The technical support is very good. We're getting on-time responses to all of our queries. We are working with the Middle East support team.

I have worked with different BPM products over the past 20 years and I find that IBM BAW has become a very mature one. It works very well compared to competing solutions.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using IBM Business Automation Workflow for banking applications.

IBM Business Automation Workflow is useful for helping us design custom user interfaces and processes we require.

IBM Business Automation Workflow could improve the integration. 

I have been using IBM Business Automation Workflow for approximately one year.

IBM Business Automation Workflow is very stable.

We have approximately 200 people using IBM Business Automation Workflow in my organization. We do not plan to increase the usage.

I have never needed to call the support.

The installation of IBM Business Automation Workflow is easy and straightforward. Anyone would be able to do it. If the person does not have any knowledge it could take them 45 minutes to complete. However, if have some knowledge of the basics you can do the implementation in approximately fifteen minutes.

We can manage the solution ourselves.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate IBM Business Automation Workflow a nine out of ten.

We are in the initial stages and using general approvals in the office within the departments that move through this system.

It's a flexible solution.

I feel that the features are not user-friendly. For small things, we contact the consultants.

There should be some reporting feature for data access, as well as easy dashboards. 

There are third-party reporting features available, and IBM's own reporting features, but they are much more expensive.

In the next release, they should have a good dashboard.

We have been working with IBM Business Automation Workflow for two years.

We are using the latest version.

It is a stable product. We have not had any issues.

We are still in the initial phases and not that many people are using it. We have not faced any issues with scalability.

We have between 30 to 50 users in our organization. We plan to continue using this solution.

We are trying to roll-out company-wide with the next couple of years and move towards IBM Business Automation.

Currently, we have a contract with the consultant and we do not need support from the vendor.

Previously, we did not use another solution. Most of what was used were manual.

We have a small team of three to four in-house and the consultant has a team of four to five.

The installation was done through a consultant.

There are licensing fees.

When you compare with Laserfiche and M-Files, IBM is expensive.

We being a government organization, our options are to select the product to open bidding. 

At this time this product is being rolled out in the initial phase of implementation with the intention of going company-wide. So at this point, it's too early to switch to some other product.

This is a product that I would recommend to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate IBM Business Automation Workflow a seven out of ten.

The primary use case is for defining business processes. 

The business process modeling is the most valuable feature. 

In terms of improvement, it could be less complex. It's quite a complicated software. 

I have been using IBM Work Automation Workflow for a year. 

It is stable. 

It is scalable but it depends on the amount of infrastructure you use. 

Their technical support is good. You get what you pay for you. 

We haven't really used other solutions. We had something in-house before this. 

It is not easy to deploy. You need a specialist's knowledge first which adds half a day to the deployment.

It's IBM, it's always expensive. 

Decide what you are looking to do and make sure that this solution does that before you go for it. 

I would rate it a six out of ten. To make it a higher score, it should be less complex. 

The most valuable feature is automation, which is quite strong and we are quite happy with it.

The setup and installation process could be made easier.

Technical support is in need of improvement.

We have been using IBM Business Automation Workflow for almost two years.

This solution is really stable.

Scalability is good. We can effortlessly expand and we are quite happy with that.

In my company, it is used in multiple departments. There are between 50 and 60 people using it at this point in time. In addition, we have six or seven people that make up the development team. It's quite good.

Going forward, we are expecting more requirements for automation and we will increase usage with demand.

We have found it tough to get the proper support from IBM. Sometimes there is a lot of duplication of work because we send out something, and then they continually ask for additional details. Eventually, we give up. Then, the next time we have a problem, we have to explain everything from scratch. It takes a lot of time.

Prior to this solution, we were using UiPath and some of our processes are still being handled by that system. In time, we may collapse all of them into this product. 

The setup is a little bit complex. It is not a lightweight solution.

We have four or five people who take care of the maintenance, in-house.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to be sure to fully understand the processes that you want to automate. This has to be done in advance of starting. Also, according to their plan, the license model should be worked out properly.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for business process management.

The solution's most valuable aspect is the fact it is highly configurable. We can do configurations very easily. 

You can do customizations very easily and because of this, it is highly flexible. 

The setup is very easy.

The UI of the solution is not good. They should work to update the solution and make it better and fresher.

They should consider adding robotics.

There should be a move to integrate the solution with RPA.

I've been using the solution for five years.

The level of stability varied at first. Initially, we had issues in terms of setup and things like that. Now, as time has passed, I believe it has improved. 

We might have had issues because of a lack of knowledge on our part.

From the second year on, we haven't faced any issues with stability. We now consider it to be quite stable. 

The level of scalability a company can achieve depends on what version they have.

Depending on the version, users can do horizontal or vertical scaling.

We haven't had any problems with scaling so far in our organization.

We have about 3,000+ users on the solution currently.

When we have any issues, we raise a ticket with support. However, I don't recollect raising a new ticket with IBM in the past 24 months now at least. We don't have too much contact with them.

We found the initial setup to be very straightforward.

The first deployment took about three to four weeks.

We handled the implementation ourselves, in house.

It's very difficult to quantify a return on investment in the entire class form. What we do is we take a process and then we look at implementing the process for the entire platform.

There's just a standard licensing fee. There aren't additional hidden costs to worry about. For example, a company wouldn't need to pay extra for access to technical support.

The solution is like a chart on the overall operations of our organization. We use it every day. It's a part of our processes. It's used every minute.

A company that is considering implementing it must make sure they have people on staff that have the right skill sets from day one to manage the solution. I would suggest if there isn't someone well versed in IBM, that someone gets training before the implementation process.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The primary use case is to underwrite workflow.

We are using the IBM Automation Platform for Digital Business to do paperless movement of underwriting files. So far, it has been good. We haven't done as many things as they are talking about with AI at the IBM conference, and I'm excited to try some of those things out.

We are using ODM, BPM, ECM, and BAW from the IBM portfolio.

We use automation to process documents, bringing the email directly into the process workflow for underwriting. We plan to expand our use of automation in our organization. We want to be able to read the forms for ACORD documents, or different other type of underwriting intake, automatically and not need to have any human processing interaction.

It helps in a lot of ways. We have moved it from just underwriting workflows to expanding it to document process automation. We have also used it as a service. The process engine itself is a service instead of just a UI, so there are a couple of other groups in our company who have been using it to facilitate their workflow process instead of just writing their own process solution or buying another one.

The solution has helped with decision-making in our organization. E.g., the processing department and some of our underwriting divisions are able to quickly create views, then their processors can very quickly decide what type of work we will do today. This can be controlled by management instead of by email.

It gives us the ability to create toolkits and use them across many different applications. It allows us to write things one time, instead of having to write a diary for every single different application. We can write at once and reuse it.

The workflow of BAW's automation is handled inside of BPM, so we can see what state it is at and how things are processing through.

I am not that excited about the move to using BPM on the web. I like the thick client, because it seems a bit faster. However, I haven't put a timer to it.

Previously, we wrote our own case management solutions, because they weren't there yet. Therefore, I am excited to see what we can do with the new case management tools inside of BAW. However, we haven't used them yet.

We would like to use machine learning to drive rules in ODM. The complexity of the rules that we can write for it is not quite what we want yet.

Technically, it does everything I want it to do. However, the development UI is sometimes a little slow.

The speed of response could use improvement.

The stability is fine. I have not seen any examples of an unstable BAW.

The scalability is wonderful. We have had no trouble with that at all.

We don't have any big issues with technical support. It is never fast enough nor quick enough. You never get to the smart guys fast enough, but that is just normal. I guess I'm satisfied with it.

Our previous solution, AquaLogic BPM, got to end of life and was bought by Oracle. Then, they changed a bunch of things in it, and we didn't like it

The straightforwardness of the initial setup was the one of the reasons that we ended up purchasing IBM BPM.

On our first proof of concept, we did use a consultant.

It has increased productivity on the development side. We have been able to move applications from thought to production quicker.

The solution saves time in development, as well as with time to deploy.

It has been able to reduce operating costs.

We looked at Oracle, Appian, and Pega.

The reason that we went with IBM was because they offered more of a developer-centric model instead of a configuration-centric model.

Don't choose a product until you've actually tried to build a simple workflow by yourself.

Our business users have fairly good usability. The Salient team wrote the SparkUI components, that we use, which allow us to really create a better user experience.

We found that a lot of our processes were very similar, then we were able to generalize them in a way that we didn't expect.

The integration process is fair and normal.

I did the tech track for the first session, then the business level track for the second. The thing that I learned in the tech track was they talked about these things called emitters: this idea of data admission. So, I'm excited to try to use the dashboards that they were talking about.