IBM Business Automation Workflow Reviews

We use it for automating workflows for medium to large-scale processes.

It streamlines who is doing what, at what time. It has increased productivity. Employees spend less time worrying about whether or not they need to work on something or checking the status of an ongoing process. Generally, it has saved time and improved business processes.

It has integrated UI and deployment models, and it has a deep set of consultant and service provider ecosystem features.

The usability of the solution, from an application developer's perspective, is strong. From an infrastructure and deployment management perspective it's okay. For business users, the usability is strong at the task- and work-completion levels.

The usability could use improvement at the data-visualization level. Also, there is room for improvement around the effort it takes to stand up and develop the solutions that are more complex, although I think that is getting addressed.

I would like to see more streamlined install and provisioning; preferably containerized IBM BPM would be helpful.

The stability is average. Once it's up and running and stable, it remains stable. But there's a little bit of extra effort needed to deploy and manage and configure both the on-premises and cloud solutions.

The scalability is better than it used to be.

The solution's technical support could use improvement. The IBM BPM platform, at least from a cloud perspective, still requires using IBM support, which is not very responsive. On premises, the product under the covers is a little bit more complex than some competitors.

There was no preexisting solution.

The initial setup was complex. The product isn't containerized, and the complexity of provisioning the proper footprint for what you need is difficult to judge ahead of time, until you get into the weeds of setting it up.

We are using the solution for automation projects and we have seen neutral to slightly positive ROI.

The biggest lesson I've learned using this solution is to start small and show success with a smaller-scale process application.

Start on the cloud, start small, and focus on your customer experience before the technical requirements.

We have integrated the solution with other solutions. It was a positive process for compatible and built-in integrations, and limited for more broad, generally-available integrations.

I would rate this solution at six out of ten because it needs to evolve and transform more quickly than it actually is, as compared to its competitors. And there is still a relatively high total cost of ownership to actually implement, support, and stand up solutions.

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 are a consultancy, so we resell the tool. We also do projects with Business Automation Workflow. I am in sales, but this is what we do as a company.

We use it for billing, logging our hours, and project management, which is our biggest use case and our core business. We have seen the tool help increase productivity in these areas.

We do use it in our organization. We call it, "Like drinking our own champagne." We use it for a lot of our internal processes and see a lot of operational efficiencies all across the board.

Everybody in my company is an expert in this tool. There is no lowest common denominator. There is nobody in the company who doesn't use this tool professionally, except for some nontechnical employees who use it for entering hours. It is very usable, but a lot of that comes down to the design of the application. The tool is only as good as how you use it.

We have used the solution to improve business process management in our organization. This is sort of the fundamental point of the it. On the case management side of the fence, but we haven't really used that component internally.

It helps develop applications very quickly. Once clients get used to it and familiar with the methodology, then they don't feel so locked in. It is able to add this element of agility to our clients' software development lifecycle. That is my favorite thing about it: You're not so locked in as you used to be when developing applications.

The tool is really great for rolling processes out quickly without being too locked into them, so you still have the ability to come back and make alterations and grow. Let your processes grow with your business and keep that competitive edge through your operational efficiencies.

No matter what somebody's technical experience level is, the tool can start adding value immediately. Even if that is just an analyst who doesn't have any technical background, they can use some of these no quote accelerators to get things from ideation to deployment in a matter of minutes.

Technical people can use the tool to build custom widgets. They can just start coding if that is their comfort zone. Though, I might not recommend it. Obviously, you should always use what is there first, then when you find the deficit start to think about code. 

I would definitely like to see a unified interface between the BPM side of the house and the case side of the house. Something that just seems a bit more cohesive, because right now there is sort of a disconnect between the BPM and the case side of the house. That makes it a bit of a hard sell sometimes. That is definitely first and foremost on my wish list.

There were some issues with it historically. For example, people didn't like the UI, but the UI is great now.

It is very stable, as long as when you build it, you adhere to best practices and build things correctly. I can't say it enough, "A tool is only as good as how you use it." It is a good tool.

It is all about how you build it. The tool is only as good as how you use it.

The technical support is pretty good. I have definitely been frustrated at times, like opening PMRs, then getting later responses than I would like. However, I also realize that the support team only has so much bandwidth.

We are a consultancy on this tool.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The implementation is very straightforward. It is very clear what each artifact type does and how they're supposed to work. It is very low code, and that low code element is continually getting better with every release. It has a lot of configuration options and is very intuitive, even to business users. 

However, once you have to get in the weeds and start scripting, it is still straightforward if you're a coder. But, if you're not, then there is a bit of a learning curve there.

Customers see ROI. 

When you're talking about ROI, we've seen infinite ROI considering that our licenses is as a partner. It's saved us from buying licenses, HR systems, and other things that we just built out ourselves. The solution has also saved us time.

It might take three or four difference licenses to get something like the functionality that we have with this tool, since what we have is custom to us.

It is pretty usable. There is still a market for people like us, which means that it is not 100 percent usable. There are also some really good accelerators in the market to even increase the usability. In general, it is very usable. As long as you have a good understanding of the process, know what you are doing, and are not falling into pitfalls, then the tool is easy enough to use. It's pretty low code.

The solution helped us with compliance or governance issues to some extent, but it is not really something that we internally use it for. I've seen it in several use cases external to our consultancy where that is the case.

The integration process is great. Every integration is unique and has its whole gamut of complexities. In general, it has the tools there to make the integration simpler and a lot more straightforward. The tools exist: Web Service connectors, subconnectors, drag and drop REST calls and SQL calls. The components are there, but that doesn't mean it's just going to work. I've seen this happen several times, but I don't think that is any fault of the tool.

I have seen a lot of use cases where it does have an effect on decision-making.

We do automation projects with this tool for a living. However, internally, it sort of depends on if we have a use case that fits the tool. If we have some resources that are available to sort of build something like that, then I will use it.

The vision of the product is very good. They are on the right path. The emerging case in process is a no-brainer, Anybody who has been in this space for awhile realizes that processes aren't structured or unstructured, and there is a lot of fluidity. While the vision is there, I just don't think it's quite there yet. This goes back to that there is a pretty strong disconnect between the case functionality and process functionality.

Biggest lesson learned: How to visualize processes and visualize improvement areas/problem areas. I really like that the tool is visual. E.g., if you get a chart that is expressing some sort of information to you, and until you can interpret the chart, you can't really act on that information. The visual component of the product: seeing processes, flow lines, boxes as are activities, swim lanes, and all these BPM concepts, which are visually displayed throughout the application, helps you understand what is happening. It helps me bring myself up to speed. 

I can go into an organization that has complex processes with no explanation. By just using this tool, I can pretty well understand what is going on. I might have some questions like, "Why did you do that?" I might not know how they got there, but I know what the organization does.

As a business partner, we generally use this product to help our customers with their digital transformations. Most of the time we use IBM BPM or DPA to provide a solution and bring continuous process improvements to our customers.

The majority of them are used by business users. It depends on what type of solutions we are building. Some are back-office applications. Some are real, end-user applications. It depends on each use case.

Our clients are using it to automate some features. With Automation Anywhere being a partner, they're trying to automate the process overall. Some customers use us for overall digitalization, automating their processes. From there, they are trying to automate using the RPA features as well.

After being acquired from Lombardi by IBM, BPA was only workflow-related. Over a period of time it evolved. It has a lot of capabilities that were added to the product, like the rules, business decision-making and, now, with a more enhanced toolkit to build applications very rapidly.

The solution has absolutely reduced operating costs. It is customer-specific. We may not know the exact ROI, but it has definitely improved. Some of our customers see more than an 80 percent reduction, depending on where it's used.

The solution has helped with compliance and governance issues. Most of the time when we build a solution using this product, it involves some approvals. Depending upon the scenario, it has to go for compliance approval. And that can be incorporated within the solution, what we build using this application.

One of the most valuable features is the way that they are adapting to the market. Initially, it was doing only workflow. Now it has started bringing all the other components like rules within the workflow and then the integration with RPA.

Also, the usability is pretty impressive. We can bring this quickly to market. We can start with a quick proof of concept and then we can take that to the next level. We can also use it to build auxiliary solutions for future use.

From what I understand, in the next release they're actually going to combine all of this together as one integrated solution. Obviously, once they started acquiring more and more products, the flavors were going to be there. Sometimes, you need an integrated solution. Customers don't want to have to say, "Oh, I'm acquiring this product, now I have to go build up that product. I have to go and build something else in another product and integrate." If we could have one unified way to build a solution, that would really help.

It's very scalable. IBM has stacks of software to quickly bring into play.

Start taking advantage of all the features that have been given as part of this product. Sometimes - especially the DBAs - they will execute it as an IT project. More than that, they should start using it from a holistic perspective. How can this bring value to the whole organization?

It's like a double-edged knife: If you don't know how to use it, it might come back to haunt you and hurt you. But the way they have implemented it, evolved it, it's actually helping us to improve and provide plug-and-play. We find that if it is not going to go well, if we need to create more APIs to overwrite some solutions, then we can actually do plug-and-play as well.

I would rate Business Automation Workflow at eight out of ten. Compared to other products, this one has actually evolved a lot, and they have brought a lot of value with it, especially adapting to the rapid expansion of industry.

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.