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IBM Business Automation Workflow

Score9.7 out of 10

71 Reviews and Ratings

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What is IBM Business Automation Workflow?

IBM Business Automation Workflow is a solution that helps users automate digital workflows to increase productivity, efficiency and insights — on premises or on cloud.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features IBM Business Automation Workflow has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 71 ratings of IBM Business Automation Workflow's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Dashboards

    Users can create, customize and share dashboards, which provide an overview of the most important metrics.

    Category average: 8.3

  • Standard reports

    The software offers pre-built reports with metrics standard to the category.

    Category average: 8.3

  • Custom reports

    Users can create custom reports.

    Category average: 7.9

Areas for Improvement

  • Support for modeling languages

    Support for modeling languages like BPML, BPEL, and BMMN.

    Category average: 8.1

  • Form builder

    Integrated form design tool

    Category average: 8.8

  • Model execution

    Ability to execute model and build code without programming skills

    Category average: 7.3

Reviews

What users are saying about IBM Business Automation Workflow.
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Kunal Jaipuriar's review

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

For business process automation developing business processes in BAW to increase time and efficiency. Specific to our experience we leveraged this in the banking and finance domain. It is easier to use if compared with the Pega platform. Also, we have better tracking options

Pros

  • Process automation
  • Workflows
  • Reduce manual effort
  • Flow customization

Cons

  • Hang issue causing system to crash upon more load
  • Migration of service take time
  • Run time data manipulation is not possible

Most Important Features

  • Streamline business processes
  • Process automation
  • Increase efficiency

Return on Investment

  • Increase efficiency
  • Reduce manual effort
  • Reduce potential errors

One of the pillars of the Digital Transformation, Business Process Manager

Incentivized
Efrain PereiroView profile
Lider de proyectos in Information Technology at Banco Galicia (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • It is a very complete solution. It has a Process Manager, Operational Decision Manager for management of business rules, CASE Manager for case management, and as of this year, it also has a suite called Digital Business Automation,where FileNet and Datacap are integrated for document management, all in a single solution.
  • After a few years, we managed to make IBM Business Process Manager a robust and mature solution. Now, we are generating more than 10,000 instances daily, with an average lifetime of 25 day--with 150 intensive users, plus an occasional 2,000. We have integrations of all kinds, WebServices, Rest, Queues, etc.
  • It allows us to synchronize several Portal Servers, with a solution called Federal Portal. In it, users enter a single portal and can see and work on tasks independently of what portal these tasks are generated by.
  • This solution serves to balance the load if it is too large, and also to give a better infrastructure for our critical processes. It also is able to coexist with different versions of the product while processes are being updated. In our case, we have 3 Portal Servers integrated to a Federation Portal.

Cons

  • In the methodology of BPM, continuous improvement is essential, and for this we must be able to count on performance indicators. In order to do this, we had to develop a scheme outside the tool, because many instances did not have an adequate performance. I am informed that IBM will shortly resolve this.
  • The BPD is an established system, meaning it is monolithic, and comes with all the issues that these types of systems have.
  • It is an easy-to-use suite for simple processes, but if you need solutions with many integrations and complex screens, you need to work with experts with at least 2 years of experience.

Return on Investment

  • In the case of retail origination, the back office required for processing was reduced by 50%. The cases sent to credit assessment were also reduced by 50%. The quality at the origin was improved by 10%.
  • By having detailed tracking for each request, the audit reports stopped being unfavorable.
  • It is a fundamental pillar in our digital growth, allowing us to align our processes to our business needs.

Other Software Used

Watson Studio (formerly IBM Data Science Experience), IBM Watson Explorer, IBM MQ, Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 4, IBM Campaign

Good BPM tool with many features.

Incentivized
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • It allows us to use mobile development, which most of the other BPM suites do not provide.
  • It adapts to new technology faster. Example: They are trying to implement microservices now, which is currently trending.
  • It has the whole structure divided into parts like process center and process management, all of which make the tracking and development and monitoring instances easier.

Cons

  • The system gets crashed when many instances go into the queue stage. The system even crashes and sometimes restarts automatically when the load on the server increases. We had to develop a separate software for this and maintain the same.
  • We cannot manipulate the data during run time. It is difficult to develop user-interfaces with complex functionality.
  • In order to consume external services that follow HTTP protocol, we need to use IDE for that, and consuming services from IDE takes a lot of time to give a response.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

Pega Platform and Bonita BPM

Other Software Used

Oracle SQL Developer, Eclipse, Notepad++

IBM BPM Review

Incentivized
Keshava Murthy B SView profile
IBM Smarter Process Solution Architect in Information Technology at Perficient (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • Performance - due to high I/O with DB some of the times the flow responds slowly to changes.
  • Supporting coarse-grained services. Some of the services with nested objects and cyclical references do not generate the types on the BPM side.
  • Support a higher number of in flight instances - the system chokes and behaves erratically once the active instances goes above 20K.

Return on Investment

  • It has added value to the upper management to give visibility into what is happening at any time in the enterprise.
  • Boosted employee morale because it gives them all the information to work the case/task in a single location.
  • Identifies bottlenecks and improves the turnover.

IBM BPM - the best commercial BPM software package

Scott FrancisView profile
Founder and Chief Technology Officer in Professional Services at BP3 Global, Inc. (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Coordinates work across departments.
  • Organizes processes around customer inputs and outcomes rather than around silos and divisions.
  • Integrates with other software systems in a straightforward way.
  • Provides efficient UI building functionality - for UIs on mobile, tablet, and desktop browsers.
  • Measures efficiency, process outcomes, SLAs.
  • Particularly strong in Financial processes (loan origination, insurance underwriting, asset management, bond processing), but also works well for logistics processes and customer services processes.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • We use IBM BPM more to help our customers than to help ourselves. For our customers, IBM BPM has helped us dramatically reduce cycle time of previously manual processes, while increasing accuracy and customer satisfaction. However, it is difficult to get customers to go on record with ROI as they treat this as confidential/private information.

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