Oracle BPM Reviews

We have used Oracle BPM on projects involving, financial customer on-boarding, accounts payable, loan origination, and capital expenditure approval.

On a recent project, we were able to seamlessly integrate multiple ERPs into a process. On the same project, we integrated content images and metadata from Oracle's WebCenter Content into the process and its user interfaces. Using BAM, the customer now sees key performance indicators they need to make decisions (e.g., revenue saved through discount achievement for AP invoices).

Oracle BPM is easy to use for both the business and developers.  Both personas design process models in a common format, tailored specifically to their skills.

Often overlooked in software evaluations, the integration to underlying databases and applications is an essential element on almost every BPM application. Oracle BPM's tool for service and application integration is the best on the market to accomplish this.

Being able to view and manage the environment is essential during the entire lifecycle of a project. Oracle BPM makes it easy for process stakeholders to manage and optimize their processes.

Oracle BPM Suite is based on the widely used industry standards that both the business and technical people are already familiar and comfortable with.

Specific features that we have found valuable include:

• Process modeling - fully supports BPMN 2.0 palette of tasks, gateways and events for both the business and technical sides.
• Business rules - Business rules can either be embedded as an integral part of a BPM process or are invoked by the process.
• Integration - Oracle BPM is layered on top of Oracle's SOA platform, a proven standards-based approach to exposing and integrating databases and backend services using Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA) adapters.
• Metrics Reporting - a key aspect of Oracle BPM is its ability to gather key performance indicators as work items flow through the process. These metrics are easily surfaced in dashboard reports in both the out of the box end user Workspace tool and its greatly improved Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) tool that comes with the product.

Although it is a robust product, its learning curve can be steep without having the proper training and mentoring on the first project.

As with most BPM projects interaction with people is a key element. Creating user interfaces the end users see and interact with as work item instances travel through process can be challenging. If ADF is used, most companies struggle due to its complexity, steep learning curve, and the need to tune it for performance. The web form design tool in Composer (currently an OEM product from Frevvo) is simple to use for citizen developers, but can be lacking in the functionality most projects need.

To get around these issues, the architecture is flexible enough to allow the use of other UI technologies. On new projects we now create and edit forms using Angular JS using REST services. This has made our developers much more productive and the forms perform better.

Version 12c of Oracle BPM, which came out in 2014, took a while to gain maturity. We have now worked through the initial bugs and 12.2.1.3 is a robust release. Oracle BAM that comes with the product has been greatly improved in this version of the product.

Oracle BPM's runtime architecture scales quite well. Each Oracle BPM project is deployed as a composite EAR file that runs in a compiled manner. The environment can be clustered.

Customer Service:

Customer service is good overall. The escalation procedures work and when they say "7/24" support they mean it.

Technical Support:

Other than the issues encountered in 12c initially, the issues have been handled well by customer support. When the need to escalate has occurred, tickets were escalated and resolved.

Initial setup requires the knowledge of someone familiar with Oracle SOA Suite and WebLogic.

On an initial project, consider getting outside mentors to work with your team. These mentors can be in-house or outside consultants. The vendor is not required in most cases.

We use it as a middleware for order management and telecommunication. So far, it has been doing okay. We have a team of 10 developers, and they are implementing middleware services on Oracle BPM, which has been working well. We have been working on a major transformation project that will merge some sub-entity company services into middleware. We have been just checking if we are doing okay, this way we can consider other products. I have been conducting recently research on other ESPs and BPMs as a result.

We use it as a middleware which encapsulates major services. The benefit from the tool is we can develop it quickly and easily use it for middleware services. We can publish the services so other applications can consume them. This is providing us some reusability and a type of security.

It is easy to find secured pathways on Oracle BPM. Especially in my country, Turkey, it is easier to find professional people experienced with Oracle Suite products.

In the future, the market is consolidating towards microservices approaching software development product. Microservices can be the future of programming, and the old way of doing middleware and implementing middleware services could shift to the microservices side, so we will need some hybrid solutions. At this time, we use the microservices, and microservices will support external digital applications that we publish on mobile and website. We will keep using the middleware side for delivery and back office systems. Therefore, it will not be 100% microservices or it will not be 100% middleware, but instead we are going to use a hybrid approach where some parts use microservices. Thus, it would be good if they could provide some additional connectors or an application developer environment for microservices. 

It could have easier administration. It takes time to configure and deploy. We need more team messaging buzz, like Kafka. People do so much business and logic coding in an ESP site, but what we need more of is lightweight messaging mechanisms, like Kafka. This is also the trend. We need some type of pretense for best practices for new generation programs, which can serve digital customers.

We do not have any problems. Stability is reliable.

We extend its own CPU base so we can scale it horizontally, as far as I know. Therefore, we do not have any major throwbacks in terms of scalability. It is doing okay.

We have more than 800 distinct applications in our IT landscape. So far, we have not have any problems with Oracle. We had enough scalability and okay development cycles, and it has been enough to cover our backup operations and order management systems.

I do not use it, but I am told that they provide good call support when needed.

I was not involved in the initial setup. It was done six or seven year ago. This was before I joined the company.

We have not switch yet, but I have been told we have some major transformations coming our way. We are evaluating if we should invest more on the Oracle side or if we can just check the other tools on the market, maybe use some other vendor, or if we are doing fine. We are looking to do some type of benchmark and maybe there will be fewer seats. It is likely that we will continue with Oracle, because we have good know-how on how Oracle BPM with good know-how from the programmers on the product. So, it is likely that we will select Oracle.

So far, it is doing well, but then market trends are shifting and digitalization is coming. More likely messaging mechanisms, microservices, and faster development cycles are needed. Faster development operations with development paradigms are forcing this. Maybe cognization of the product according to a recent trends on the market would be good.

Be aware of market trends. The shift coming over from the business side is a strong factor. This is so we can develop faster products and have quicker order management. It is important to know about the business requirements.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Its support is most important.
• Its popularity in the market, especially in my country. This is important, so you can hire skilled people for the tool. Otherwise, you have to go to vendor or extend your company integrators for skills. People who have development know-how is a major criteria in the market. IBM and Oracle products are popular on the market because we can easily find developers and administrators for these two vendors.

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.

• 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.

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 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.