I am a member of the core team at an insurance company that handles architectural concerns.
We are currently evaluating workflow automation platforms that have microservices. From your experience which is the best platform?Â
Thanks! I appreciate the help.Â
Well, I only have experience of 3 products: IBM Blueworks Live, IBM Business Process Manager and Signavio Workflow Accelerator.
The workflow functionality in Blueworks (when I last used it) was so limited as to be pointless.
IBM BPM is a full BPMS and costs a significant amount of money and takes a lot of developments and administration.
For my use cases, Signavio Workflow Accelerator is so easy to use and has a great deal of useful functionality. If it doesn't have specific things out of the box, it is easy to Google JavaScript and to create your own script tasks for automation - including automated decision-making based on your business rules. It is a full managed SaaS - browser-based on cloud-hosted - no installation. It is so easy to deploy and administer - you could run a small organisation using it. You can also use JavaScript to work with APIs if you want to integrate IT enablers with your processes - but I haven't attempted that yet.
We have experience using JBoss BPM Suite (owned by Red Hat today) in multiple projects. Monolith, Reactive Microservices. We created a Master Data Management (MDM) system for the federal agency. The system allowed: every object to be configured (attributes, dictionaries and linked entities). Every action was described as a business process.
jBPM provides multiple abstractions for business process definition such as user tasks, service tasks, gates, etc. We used almost everything from jBPM to provide a wide variety of configuration options for system administrators.
We preferred using JBoss because it allowed flexibility and good integration with existing Java code. Also, we believe that platforms with predefined functionality may be easier to use but will have certain limitation in the future development/integration.
I use a platform called SoftExpert. www.softexpert.com
It has BPM, Workflow and ECM integrated. I like it a lot!
According to my experience, I would recommend M-Files as an Enterprise Content Management platform with built-in process management functionalities.
A high-end solution is IBM Business Process Management.
Since you are working for an insurance company you probably also look beyond microservices and have an interest in an Intelligent BPM solution that is capable of handling cases, documents and orchestration. And this all in a low-code environment. We are using Appian for the last 9 years for this and deployed this especially in the Financial- Insurance market. (for example Munich RE).
From what I know and have read, maybe looking at Camunda BPM would really make sense.
I have not worked with microservices in Camunda but just used it for a quick project three years ago. In the meantime, they have developed the platform quite nicely, and claim they support microservice orchestration. They have a lot of references in the Insurance industry.
They also have an opensource version which is really good for a PoC and to start off even in production.
We can use work automation using Puppet/Ansible, Terraform with Dockers & Kubernetes. We have expertise in this domain.
Backbase is #1, Then Betty Blocks, then Appian, then Mulesoft and after that Logic Apps which is the poor's man orchestration tool.
Aura portal is the solution! youtu.be
- It's a zero-code Plattform and it's easy to do whatever process you want.
- It's a Spanish big eBPMs solution.
Look at the first link and then look for the one which talks about zero code.
I must say that I have a bias because my company is a manufacturer of a BPMS (Dexon BPM) that is based on a microservice architecture and that allows you to orchestrate workflows that go through heterogeneous systems. My recommendation is that you consider the security issue and that you look for a platform that complies with PCI-DSS
What would you describe as a microservice? As the President of ProMation Systems I can say that TrueBPM® may be very helpful but I need to be sure that I can meet your requirements.
In the case of using microservices "in full," it is necessary to choose the BPM platform which could be embedded into microservice itself. Only I know are Activiti BPM (could be considered as deprecated) and Camunda BPM. We have also one client using Camunda that way with satisfaction.
Working with my client (a state agency), we have opted for a low-code solution using Bizagi to develop our new system. We are replacing a collection of applications developed initially in 1987, with additions made Lego(TM)-like over the years. We have been able to not only build and deploy a new system faster, but also have a great tool for working with the user community (internal and external, including attorneys, employers, and insurers) to redesign and improve business processes at the same time.