BP Logix Process Director vs. IBM Business Automation Workflow

BP Logix Process Director is well suited for designing forms and publishing workflows that need to be triggered and when forms are submitted. It has good support for communicating data to and from external systems via web services or direct database calls

Incentivized

It is best suited for streamlining business processes in our enterprise. It acts as middleware and allows to use of mobile development

Incentivized

• Develop forms using Microsoft Word and Process Director plug-ins - start small then use predefined Custom Tasks, Knowledge Views, and samples to create extremely impressive results.
• Integration with Microsoft Active Directory, SQL Server databases and tables, Excel, etc. - Incredibly powerful! We've taken eforms to a new level by integrating SQL queries into controls and custom tasks and embedding the results into developed forms.
• Some of the forms can get pretty complicated with controls and custom tasks. If we can't find the answer to desired activities we'd like to incorporate, BP Logix support is just a phone call or email away. Their support is awesome and very responsive.

• Case management - provides flexibility for dynamic processing.
• Smarter process - streamlines repeatable activities and does work distributions.
• Advanced integration - makes integration with other systems very easy.

Incentivized

• Better support for archiving data.
• Better tools to monitor and suggest performance improvements that need to be made to make the software run faster.

Incentivized

• Installation is (typically) a bit painful out of the box and requires expert help.
• Following installation, initial projects require outside consulting expertise to be successful. Projects without importing BPM expertise tend to have much higher failure rates. Though individually the technologies involved are widely available and not complicated, combined and collectively BPM solutions require a flexible, creative, technical talent to help deliver. It takes time to learn the judgment and craft required.
• The out-of-the-box UI controls (widgets) are not terribly inspiring- on desktop or mobile. Use of third party toolkits (e.g. Brazos) is recommended. Silver lining: those third party toolkits are quite good.

This particular decision will be made by other people. Overall IBM BPM is the best BPM engine that I have worked with. It is implemented at our company and IT and business are already somewhat familiar with it. Therefore if asked I will recommend renewal as long as the price is reasonable.

Building complex UIs can be cumbersome. Calling complex SOA services that have a lot of objects, types, anyType attributes, recursive object references, etc can be cumbersome. The Process Designer IDE communicates with the server side Process Center a lot and as a result it is pretty slow. The IDE is also Eclipse based which doesn't make it faster.

Issues can be raised through tickets and it works based on the priority of the issue. The Support Team response is also good and the solution is provided in a short span of time. In a case where the issue is serious, they try to find out the root cause and provide an alternative for it.

Incentivized

• Attended on premise sysadmin training for 4 days, 8 hours per day. Although further follow-up training was available, I never felt the need to go back. Training was very hands-on with real modeling (rather than just following a manual). Very effective.

• Very satisfied – not too difficult at all.
• We had a consultant available as part of our contract, but we didn’t really need to use (except for some advice on ActiveDirectory and single sign-on)

We initially went through an RFP process with desired and required outcomes and performance marks we were looking to achieve. At the time of evaluation, Process Director was really the only product we considered.

Pega Pega is a comprehensive suite which offers a unique theme of BPM development in the market. A no-coding approach based on rules with inheritance makes Pega a very powerful product. However Pega, falls short on integration centric capabilities and very rigid to customize. On the other hand IBM comes with array of products which suits needs of varying degree. Advanced integration is solved by BPEL Process Server which has support for state based patterns and mediation. Dynamic rules and event management can be solved with WODM, Cloud to on-premise connectivity with Cast Iron, Enterprise gateway and security usecases with DataPower, Social BPM with IBM BPM , WODM, mobify with Worklight. Pega has a little bit of eveything here and there. It solves the dynamic rule management, brings out the flavor of Social BPM and mobility with Antenna ( I guess) and predictive analytics as well in one single suite. There are certain usecases which needs to have a little bit of everything, however this little bits and pieces of functionality when its blows, Pega would have problems to scale. With IBM its a bit nightmare to maintain a variety of technologies, however you can wish to go for one without the other and go for something only when you truly need it. Pega vs IBM Its difficult to pick a winner. In nutshell when you want a full scale BPM with rich integration capabilities go for IBM BPM. On the other hand if you hava mature integration capability already, Pega can yield quick results for you as well. Pega's strength is its methodology. IBM BPM's strength is integration. Actually you can't go wrong with both in terms of implementation. My strong recommendation is to invest time to process analysis and pick a good vendor to support consulting and implementation.

It scales from small team interactions to business processes serving thousands of employees, as well as straight-through-processing needs that go well beyond. Of course, scale is always in the eye of the beholder, but IBM BPM does a good job of giving you all of the hooks, APIs, and data that you need to take on whatever scaling approaches you need to meet the load

• I can only speak of the process I am responsible for, positive notes: the automated forms frees up our employees to do other work.
• The return rate of our self certification form has increased since we've gone electronic.

Incentivized

• Easier to implement and does not take much effort to work on it.
• Versioning made easy. We can even degrade to the previous version in case of any issue, which is not easier to do in other BPM suites, thereby, saving a good amount of time.
• Helped in achieving client requirements faster, which results in a higher return of investment.

Incentivized