What is our primary use case?
I was a consumer of the IBM products and implement IBM BPM in Latin America. I stopped being an end user of IBM products in past year, but still implement products.
Primary use case is more than 80 percent financial services, banks mainly, but also insurance:
- Banks or organizations use it for credit cards or for opening accounts.
- Insurance use it for checking insurance claims.
How has it helped my organization?
It excels at analytics. It provides visibility across all activities of a company's processes and performance. It shows the activities, who is performing the activities, and all the values around the activities: the when, how much, and how many.
It helps improve your process through continual measurement. The idea is to have a flexible process without too much programming.
What is most valuable?
It has an appealing DSA key interface. It is an out-of-the-box screen. It is uncommon among tools in the market. You don't need to switch between interfaces because everything inside the same tool. It provides a faster result for less money.
An advantage of the BPM is you can complete the user cycle of a BPM solution to identify the process and model it, then compute, execute, and measure on the tool, and finally it will improve the process inside the tool. You can complete the whole lifecycle of a process inside the tool. First, you should identify the part you want to improve, set up a goal for that improvement, set the scope, and obtain a sponsor. Once you do that, you put a plan in place and the next step is to define the process, define each activity, and the roles. The next step is to define the screen for the end user and its relationship with other system, then put the process in place. This implies putting in place an application and developing over BPM which will have the activities, processes, roles, and screens. After that, it's only measuring and improving the process in the BPM tool.
What needs improvement?
The simulation feature is great and provides a lot of value, but its complex to use. People need a high level of statistics to use it.
For how long have I used the solution?
More than five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
IBM can handle anything. IBM BPM can handle a lot of variables on an environment when you pass through a lot of transactions simultaneously.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is extremely scalable.
How are customer service and technical support?
The technical support is good. They have good people working for them at IBM, who are knowledgeable and responsive. You need to have also good counterparties on your side to ask the right questions.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I used to work with Oracle BPM, but they changed the product's landscape. Instead of retraining, we changed to IBM BPM (Lombardi at the time).
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup depends on your environment. If it's a standard implementation, it is out-of-the-box and could be done in a two hours. A more complex environment could be more difficult to set up.
What about the implementation team?
I am the implementer of the solution for clients.
What was our ROI?
The volume of transactions a team can perform or execute generally increases. For example, I worked with a company using IBM BPM to decrease the time for obtaining a credit card from three days to 15 minutes.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price is not great.
The cloud and license of the subscription model for IBM BPM can be complex. There are a lot of alternatives to choose from, like a VAR, partner, or sales team from IBM. There might also be push back from the hardware team to be on-premise.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I recently began working with Red Hat BPM JBoss BPM because IBM has became complex on its pricing.
We also evaluate companies like Bonita, Documentum, and ProcessMaker BPM. We did also consider Bonita when we were looking at Red Hat, but they don't have offices in Mexico.
What other advice do I have?
It is the Ferrari of BPM tools.
To implement this product, you should have a process department and an ERP. Without an ERP solution, the transactionality of the BPM will not work.
IBM Case Manager can assist you if you have a process that is unstructured. It is a very advanced tool, but very expensive.
When I am looking at selecting a vendor for my client, I consider:
- The size of the initiative
- The cost of the licensing or subscription
- Training
- Availability of a consultant to implement the solution.
I was a previous IBM partner in Mexico and Peru.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
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