#1 most frequent
United States of America
39.7%142 installations of 358
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
Videos
Top Performing Features
Dashboards
Users can create, customize and share dashboards, which provide an overview of the most important metrics.
Category average: 8.4
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: 8
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
Who Buys & Uses IBM Business Automation Workflow
#2 most frequent
India
8.4%30 installations of 358
#3 most frequent
France
5.9%21 installations of 358
Kunal Jaipuriar's review
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
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.
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
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
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.
