IBM BPM Reviews

We use it mainly for ACM. We currently have two projects for e-services. 

I am currently using V5.5.5, but I started with the old version from the content management survey and image survey. I also used V4, V4.5, and V5.1.2.1.2. Currently, we have a cloud deployment, but previously, we had an on-premises deployment.

Its dashboard is easy to use and very good. It allows us to customize.

You must have good experience to work with it. It is not that easy. 

Its installation is complex, especially in the new version for business automation, and it could be improved. It has a safety application embedded inside it, and you need to do a lot of configuration to install it. I have been working for two days to resolve an issue.

I have been using IBM BPM for more than 12 years. 

It is very stable.

It has good scalability. We have many sites. On a big site, we have about 4,000 users. For other sites, we have about 500 or 600 users.

Usually, we provide support for the end users. In case we face some complicated issue and we are unable to solve it, we raise it to IBM. They are very good. We are partners of IBM.

Its installation is complex for the new version.

I would recommend this solution. It is a very good solution, and they are working on improving it in all areas. They are integrating it with Navigator, ACM, FileNet, and many other things.

I would rate IBM BPM an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for business management.

The solution can be deployed both on-prem and cloud.

The solution is a module and we can interface with consent and document management which is important.

The designer feature, compared to other solutions is easy to use.

The solution is an out-of-the-box solution.

The cost of the solution has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for 15 years.

I give the stability an eight out of ten. The solution works especially well with Linux.

I give the scalability an eight out of ten.

The initial setup depends on if the solution is deployed on the cloud or on-prem. The cloud version is easy because we just have to deploy the containers. The on-prem setup requires a lot of work before we can even begin because we need to masterpiece all the layers from the operations system to the database, and the middleware at the front and back end. I give the initial setup an eight out of ten. The deployment takes a full business day.

An experienced person can do the complete deployment on their own however we usually use three people, one for the beginning, middle, and end.

I give the pricing an eight out of ten. The solution is a bit expensive.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

IBM BPM is a good solution but we should always look at our business requirements. The solution is intended for medium and large businesses, so it is not recommended for small businesses.

IBM BPM is used for integrations. We are an enterprise application integration team. We integrate most of the companies' integrations and business process modeling.

Our organization has improved by using IBM BPM because our development time has reduced and connectivity improved.

We have had to use Mule as an alternative integration tool because it is more flexible than IBM BPM.

In a future release, the solution should add more APIs. That's why we moved to  Mule. It should not be a drastic change. What we found out is in the new release, of IBM, it has completely changed. I would like my old features to run on the new server so that I don't have to migrate some of the APIs.

I have been using IBM BPM for approximately 15 years.

IBM BPM is a stable solution.

The solution is scalable.

I have used the support from IBM BPM.

I rate the support from IBM BPM a three out of five.

I have used Mule previously.

The initial setup of IBM BPM is complex. 

In the initial stages, we have used consultants for the implementation, but as we have had some experience we are using them less.

Stability is one of the most important features of this solution.

I rate IBM BPM a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case is moving documents electronically from desk to desk.

The most valuable features come in the bundle, the design process, creating services, creating BPDs, creating coaches, and UI/UX.

I would like to see the user-friendliness improved and the training become free of cost for the solution. I would like to see the front-end support improved because it should be fully integrated and supported.

I have been using IBM BPM for the past three years.

The current system is definitely stable and the database compatibility is very reliable. 

There are over three thousand five hundred users currently implementing IBM BPM and therefore the scalability is excellent.

Technical support is always good.

Positive

The initial setup is definitely complex compared to other market comparatives.

The price is good but could be a little lower.

I would rate IBM BPM an eight on a scale of one to ten.

It is an on-premises solution that helped us automate business processes like onboarding customers, loan management, loan approval, and leave approval.

The features allow you to connect, and things work seamlessly. The coding and the maps are also valuable. I feel good about the features, and its beauty is that anybody can design it.

I have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

IBM BPM is stable, but sometimes there are issues with the server. I am unsure if the issue is due to the VAS server or the BPM, but there was some instability when we went through a few of the final enrollments.

We could not proceed with any scalability due to some business decisions.

I have not contacted IBM Technical Support for IBM BPM. I have only engaged with support through forums and the blocks.

Positive

The setup is straightforward. However, the debugging was not straightforward.

Deployment was also quick and not complicated. I was not part of the deployment team, but I believe we used an integrator for deployment.

In terms of licensing, we have to make it free for the developers so more people can install and use it. It is important to make at least licensing free to try in the cloud, not just for IBM BPM but for any of the IBM products.

This can help companies start to push through solutions and proposals. For example, licensing could be free, providing developers something to try in the cloud. Because there are regular audits in all companies when you install, some companies may see this as harmful. Therefore, a provision to try it free on the cloud can increase the number of skilled PA developers.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use IBM BPM for marketing. We use a lot of processes on IBM BPM at the bank.

In my Organization, we have a lot of business cases to bring to the BPM Platform. We bring all most workflow like ATM Operation, Loan process for Business Banking and Retail banking.

Some of the features that I like the most are team management and process performance. They are both very useful and very powerful with regard to the workflow.

It's a stable solution and can easily be deployed.

Some of the features are not enough for my business. We need to build custom user management for the many end users affected by BPM.

For IBM BPM, we have half a million users with their own processes in IBM BPM. Currently, we have a lot of processes, and we have a lot of custom groups for the onsite user to look at and run on their groups. When we add a lot of users at the same time to a group, the process admin is not enough for this, and we need to use the custom interface to do it. So, there are some issues with scalability.

The cost is higher in comparison to that of Camunda, for example.

I've been using IBM BPM for a year.

We are currently on-premises but hope to have a cloud version as well. We have a lot of processes that may need to be run on-premises and on the cloud. We hope to use Amazon AWS for the hybrid cloud services.

The stability is good at present.

We have had some issues with scalability. Currently, we have a lot of processes, and we have a lot of custom groups for the onsite user to look at and run on their groups. When we add a lot of users at the same time to a group, the process admin is not enough for this, and we need to use the custom interface to do it.

We currently have about 5000 users and may increase to 6000 to 7000 users next year. The users are member staff and managers.

The customer support has been fine with IBM.

We have used LinuxONE, but we have a lot of solutions related to IBM. We chose IBM BPM for the sake of consistency.

We didn't have any big issues with the network deployment.

We needed two people for the deployment.

We have in-house and also use some vendors for development. If the rate is level 1 to 10 I think I will rate for 6. 

I already compared some solutions related to business process management, and I saw that the cost of IBM BPM is more expensive compared with that of Camunda, for example.

We also pay for support.

Before choosing This solution We already create a business case to compare some Enterprise Solution. Have Page, Cammuda, IBM BPM

If you follow good business processes, I think that IBM BPM on-premises is a good choice. It's a good solution, and I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

I used it in my previous company where we did a lot of work with banks, financial institutions, and accounting firms. We were primarily using it for automating business processes, but a lot of them were really custom applications that used the process engine for making things happen. We were using it in innovative ways to make that BPM process engine do lots of other things that I'm not sure it was really ever designed to do. There was a lot of financial stuff. There were financial calculations that would fire off a SQL process and then get the results back. 

I liked its robustness the most. It was a very robust platform in my experience. It seemed like a very stable and powerful tool for handling lots of concurrent users and hammering at the system. 

It is a really powerful tool, but its entry price is so high, which makes it a very exclusive club for who gets to use it. 

The thing that seemed to be the most intolerable was that you could put lots and lots of users on it, and it worked fine, but if you put lots and lots of developers on it, it sure seemed to have challenges. The biggest challenge was the development because of the Eclipse tool. It just seemed like irrespective of the development team that you put together, whether it had 10 or 50 people, you would end up having to reboot the development server throughout the day when you concurrently had lots of people hammering on the system. The development server just got sluggish. This was true for every project I was on. Once you got more than about five people working on the system at the same time, it would just get slower and slower during development work, and the only way to fix it was to reboot the server. It became just like a routine. Sometimes, we would reboot at lunch or dinner time, which is silly. After the cloud instances started rolling out, I never saw that again. That was probably the one big advantage of the cloud version. Instead of using an independent Eclipse-based process development tool, we moved to web-based process and design. The web-based tool definitely had greater performance than the Eclipse-based tool. I never got onto another project after that with 50 people, so I don't know how the performance is when you get a large team on it, but it definitely seems that the cloud design tool was a massive improvement.

I have been using this solution for a little over seven years.

It was very stable. 

It is a powerful system. It can scale to really big numbers in terms of the number of users. You can put lots and lots of users on it, and it works fine, but if you put lots and lots of developers on it, it seems to have challenges.

It was a development house, and we had 25 people using it, but now, because of COVID, they have cut back, and there are probably 14 or 15 people left.

There are different kinds of tech support. There is the free knowledge-based stuff, and they also have really good development support if you have a high-end contract. I have used all that, and it is pretty fine. Sometimes, we would find bugs, and they would send us a fix that would get rolled in with the next version. I don't like to be the one that uncovers real bugs, but it has happened.

Support was superior and absolutely wonderful if you could afford it. It is IBM, so if you're in that ecosystem, they expect you to have lots of money and be prepared to let it go.

My first exposure to BPM was with IBM BPM. I had never heard of it before I got the job.

Having used lots of software over my life, I would say this one is pretty much on the complex side. Before the cloud version, it was challenging to make sure you've got the right versions downloaded. They had so many different variants with different licensing agreements, and then the patching has to be done in a particular order. The installation has always felt like a homebrew scripting system rather than a really robust installer. It always felt like if you made one mistake, it might take you an hour to back out of it. It was not a very forgiving and intuitive installation.

I wish it was less expensive. I don't know why their pricing model is so high for a piece of software that could benefit so many. It just seems to me that they could have a lower cost, maybe with fewer features or whatever, but it should be possible to do a lower cost workflow software that uses the same interface and underlying engine but does not cost so much that you have to be a Fortune 50 company to buy it. It is annoying to me. There are a lot of solutions that IBM has that are really powerful but nobody can afford them. They know their business, but I still feel that there are a lot of customers who would benefit from this sort of thing. I don't know what this elitism is all about. I am sure they have people doing the money numbers, but it seems like you can make a lot more money by selling it to way more people for a little bit less.

When it first started, one of the things that were clunky about it was that it was ugly out of the box. It was not a very pretty program. There was a whole ecosystem of people who would do development on top of this IBM business tool, and everybody was coming out with their own toolkits to have a better UI application-wise. That was a real big problem. Towards the end, they bought up something called SPARK UI, and that toolset was significantly prettier and made the applications that you produce with BPM look a lot nicer. There are definitely some improvements there, and they are heading in the right direction.

In my previous organization, we had mostly moved to the cloud. Originally, I was doing server implementation, so we were running everything on AWS and EC2 instances. After that, we moved over to cloud-based stuff. I've been doing IT work for 25 years, and I've always been a get inside and figure out what's going on kind of guy. Personally, for troubleshooting, I don't like the extra layer of abstraction. I like being able to dig in and go right for the logs and see exactly what's happening. I like being able to see exactly what's going on performance-wise. The cloud instances felt a little further away, but on the other hand, I didn't really see any of the performance issues, so there wasn't a lot of troubleshooting to do. Maybe it's just me being old-fashioned, but I do prefer the ability to get in as far as I want to go into troubleshooting. BPM in itself was already running in a big Java instance on IBM, so it was already isolated in the operating system into its own Java Virtual Machine. There were already abstraction issues, but I did enjoy having more detailed access.

IBM has clearly invested a lot of money in making the product robust in developing it. At the same time, as an IT professional within the same career field, it is risky to be a single vendor ecosystem participant. It is really much wiser to have BPM development skills that would transfer to other platforms. I would say don't forget that there are other systems besides IBM BPM to fix automation and workflow challenges.

I would rate IBM BPM a seven of ten. It is really good and powerful, and you can do a lot with it, but its price is hard, and there are challenges using it.

We're using BPM in our policy area for when we deploy new rates. We're an insurance company. We change rates based on market trends, or analysis, or new vehicles in the market. We try to get those change requests in, process them, and get them back out so our rates are updated for market share.

We had been using a process that was very manually intensive. We use BPM to take that manual process and automate it from start to finish. When the product manager requests a change, it will go to the pricing analyst, they'll do their work and it's all organized and coordinated in sequence, so that they can make the right decisions at the right times for the process. And hopefully reduce the time that we get the rate revisions out to market.

We're not using it with Case Manager, it's just BPM exclusively at this point. In terms of workflow process, as I mentioned, the request comes in and it follows a sequence of events. The pricing analysts that work on these requests, they have a lot of decisions to make, a lot of documentation to look at based on state regulations or different product types. This helps them organize that and presents the information to them at the right step of the process, so they're not spending extra time searching through hundreds of pages of documentation to try to find what they need. It's all right there as they work through the process.

Right now we're about eight months in, and the processes are long. They can take multiple weeks, so we haven't had a chance to go through a number of those to realize the benefits. But just word of mouth, and talking to people using it, they're seeing value in more efficiency in the steps that they're working through, they have documentation presented to them. Word of mouth has been great, but we haven't actually seen the numbers yet because it's just been implemented recently.

It is having an impact on our ability to change or update our processes. There is information during the process that the analyst will look at, their procedures. We created a part of the application such that the business can change those procedures as needed, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. As the reps go through the process, they don't necessarily know it's changing, they just know they have to refer to some documentation, and the business can keep that up to date. That's been a great way for them to make those changes quickly as they need to.

It's really helped our customers learn the process. Before you go into BPM you have to document the process. Working with the different groups that are involved with the process, there was good collaboration so they understand what the process is and how it can be most efficient, prior to adding the tool on top of it.

So, process analysis first and then applying the tooling, it's been working great.

I would like to see more inclusion of RPA technologies. If we have more manual processes, we can use robotic process automation and integrate that in with the solution. Other than that, it's meeting our needs with what the requirements were.

In production, it's great. We have about 60 or so users, so it's small. We are in the cloud. There was some learning early on in development of the application. We just had one, sometimes two, developers, and there were some things that we had to do in the cloud to allow for the performance. It was taking up memory and we didn't know it. We had to work with IBM support, create some scripts to clean up the environment on a weekly basis, so that we weren't loading up memory.

It was a little challenging early on because we had just started. We were having problems right away with just two developers, but we got it sorted out and support helped.

We haven't had an opportunity to scale it. From what I understand about the architecture, it's definitely scalable to the enterprise. But we haven't used it in that capacity yet.

We just have the one application and it has not been in production long enough to really see the ROI yet, in terms of scaling. But based on the project, cost benefit analysis early on, it was showing positive. But we're not there yet.

It's been good. They've been responsive. We've been able to escalate when we needed to. We haven't had any incidents in production. It was just, while we were developing a solution, working with it, there were some issues early on, and support was great.

No solution previously. We've been discussing BPM for a number of years, just looking for the right use case and the right time to do it.

When selecting a vendor, typically we look to see if we have strategic partners, strategic relationships with larger vendors, like IBM; if they have the product that meets the requirements. We tend to look at analyst information to say, "Okay, who are the players in this particular space?" We tend to go with that as a starting place, and go from there. If they're someone we're already doing business with, and we have a strategic relationship with them, that will be our first point of reference, and then look at the requirements, can they meet the requirements?

We went with IBM largely due to, from what I gather, the requirements, the technology and functionality, were very similar. And we weren't doing business with the other vendors, while IBM, we are.

It was straightforward from our perspective. It was in the cloud, they provisioned the instance for us. However, I think there were some things that we didn't know about that needed to be fixed, and those incidents happened early on. We were a little bit caught off guard. 

We thought there might have been a little more discussion early on about, "Hey, if you're doing this, set it up this way," or some best practices or some guidance that we didn't get. But we fixed the issues and were able to work through that. From that point on, it's been good.

We worked with IBM to implement. I think we implemented it at the right time. I don't think we needed to have started earlier. The business unit that's using it had some overarching projects to look at, in terms of efficiency and improving speed to market. As they were looking at different technologies or process improvements, one of the options was to try to clean up this process. In working with them and working with IT, we landed on using BPM for that. It was actually good timing for their overarching goals. They have other projects in flight that will work in parallel with this to hopefully reduce the time to market.

I think this solution is an eight out of 10. It has a strong place in the market. BPM is one of the leading tools, if not the best BPM solution out there. It has extensibility across the platform to allow you to do any number of things. It gives you scalability and functionality, breadth to handle just about anything you need to do.

Regarding advice, if you're not using a partner, use a partner, or use IBM to get some consulting services to help you get started. They have some quick-win programs that are designed to come in, they'll bring a developer in and they'll work with your developer to get you started. That's what we did and that worked really great. We got an understanding of the product, we got an understanding of how to deploy the product. And when we were done with that engagement, we were off and running. I would definitely say go that route. It works.