I used the product to develop a process orchestration “framework” to be used in systems integrations between customer and internal ITSM applications (e.g., primarily for Change Management, CMDB, Incident Management, Problem Management, and Request Management). The framework, which made excellent use of stored procedures, included the following dynamic request-driven features:

• request routing (e.g., ensuring a request from “ACME” gets to its intended recipient)
• request sequencing (e.g., ensuring an update request from “ACME” is held until proof of the insert request from “ACME” has completed, and ensuring requests are processed based on the order they were submitted to the framework, as opposed to the order in which they were received by the framework)
• exception handling (e.g., retrying a step within a particular process, resubmitting requests, timing-out requests, and reporting exceptions back to requesters)
• data validation (e.g., ensuring each request comprised the data needed to ensure the successful delivery of the request)
• data transformations (e.g., data look-ups and data overrides)
• data delivery (e.g., primarily using SOAP and RESTful web services for both synchronous and asynchronous request deliveries and acknowledgements)
• request acknowledgement (e.g., during synchronous request delivery, the framework was capable of producing an acknowledgement request on behalf of the recipient, if one was required)
• relationship maintenance (e.g., the framework supported one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many record relationships between customer and internal ITSM applications)

In order to accomplish all of this, I made use of CA Process Automation objects (e.g., Processes, Start Request Forms, Calendars, Schedules, and Datasets) and operators (e.g., Run JavaScript, Invoke SOAP Method, Execute Process, and Query Database). Using template objects and template code in combination with extremely robust stored procedures and tables, developers were able to release brand new integrations during every two-week development cycle with a very minimal number of defects discovered during testing. At the end of testing, it was proved the product and the framework was capable of serving every design, performance, and support requirement for our day 1 and day 2 operational needs.

It gives us predictability in terms of our use of the solution becuase we can standardize our implementations. That means we can implement more quickly with fewer resources in a process that has been fleshed out over time.

The benefits are the efficiency we achieve with such a product. We could automate processes, which we was done in the past by humans. This will speed up the reaction by 10 times and will save us a lot of money.

I can really see ourselves using PAM purely in the stand alone environment. We are using it to integrate all the different products that we have with CA. I can see it being used even if we were using other third-party products like Remedy.

PAM has the ability to integrate and build solutions that work well in CA's suite of service management products and those that are outside of service management.

Before implementing this product, our Problem and Change Management Processes were very poor. We were unable to implement complex business rules, so our analysts had to do a lot of manual activities and we were very dependent on people’s personal knowledge. Nowadays, thanks to CA Process Automation (PAM), we no longer have this problem. Since PAM is capable of running almost any kind of task, we now have all of the processes' rules placed inside of it.

We took our server provisioning process from about 30 days to about 4 days on the first iteration of implementation. That was in 2012. Now we’ve got provisioning a stack of servers in about 2 hours. We’ve automated probably 15 or 20 manual processes that run on a regular schedule.

We're required to engage with less human interaction for the processes. It takes the errors out and makes it more consistent. It's simple for our team to use because you only need to drag-and-drop connections.

This tool is used in my organization for automating IT infrastructure related incidents or service requests. 

The role modeling helps us to have more control over our users. It help us straighten up the environment with respect to orphaned accounts, which means the environment is more secure. So the benefit is more internal for IT.

For ETL purposes, this application accomplishes each requirement for data manipulation.

We've been able to automate work that would have otherwise been done manually.