Appian is well regarded for its ease of use, and its cloud based BPMS is an attractive alternative for many customers. BPMN solutions can be rapidly built through drag-and-drop functionality and a native process repository captures and stores process models for rapid reuse. Business rules can be created to define your critical policies and procedures with a forms interface design capability enabling fast creation of task forms and dashboards. Complex event processing is also supported for tracking, analyzing, and responding to business events.
Bosch Software Innovations (BSI) addresses business process management (BPM), business rules management (BRM) and the Internet of Things (IoT). Clearly this focus is ideal for process automation where devices with sensors can be incorporated, and many decisions can be handled by deterministic business rules. In essence this means that BSI is oriented toward event driven processes, and there is some level of support for complex event processing.
There is strong emphasis on visual tools, and particularly the visual BRM tools. The inubit Suite contains all three components (BPM, BRM and IoT), although each can be used separately and is highly modular.
Clearly this will be of great interest to businesses which need to integrate devices and senors into their business processes, and can largely automate decisions through BRM.
AWD from DST Systems is a scalable, functionally rich business process management (BPM) solution that uses a Java enterprise edition (JEE)-based architecture to deliver performance scalability and security – all on commodity hardware. A variety of services are offered to healthcare payer organizations and those in financial services, and the configuration based models work well in these industries. However these can prove to be inflexible for more dynamic environments.
Content management (typically documents of various kinds) features strongly, although social data support is focused around Twitter and Facebook. AWDs Case Management workspace is an effective tool for people whose work has less structure, spans time, requires collaboration, and is unpredictable.
This is a mature offering and DST Systems has considerable experience in a variety of industries.
IBM does pretty well all things ‘process management’. Organizations can choose between a fairly standalone environment (Business Process Manager Standard Edition) and a broader, more encompassing product set (Business Process Manager Advanced Edition). This latter incorporates middleware and a greater emphasis on integration. For smaller organizations IBM provides Business Process Manager Express with a process execution, monitoring and optimization engine, allowing participants to engage in process improvement activities.
Blueworks Live is a web based tool for the analysis and design of business processes in a collaborative environment. There are many other components and tools, which in total give users all the business process management facilities they might possibly want. The problem with this is the cumulating complexity associated with using the products as their number increase, and the price is not exactly small – for more modest sized organizations at least.
TotalAgility from Kofax majors on customer focused processes, and particularly the integration with multiple document sources. To this end it integrates with a wide variety of content management systems (CMS) and is largely CMS agnostic. The architecture is .NET focused and provides good integration with SharePoint.
TotalAgility is available on-premises and as a cloud service. It provides a number of ease-of-use features, such as the ability to ‘skin’ a process so that it appears different to different users with differing needs. Other products from Kofax integrate with the BPMS, and particularly business intelligence applications, which can add a certain level of intelligence to business processes.
OmniDocs and OmniFlow from Newgen Software Technologies provide a document oriented focus for BPM activities – and particularly customer focused processes. Use is made of components from some open source products, such as Jaspersoft for analytics and the Drools business rule management system.
TaskCentre from Orbis is a powerful suite of Business Process Management (BPM) technologies that ‘loosely couples’ business applications enabling organisations to automate virtually any employee-driven business process. It supports workflow, document automation, business alerts, application integration and self-service reporting for stakeholders. A number of vendor aligned products are available, including BPM for Microsoft, for SAP, Sage, SalesLogix and several others.
Pegasystems is a highly regarded BPM solution that has incorporated advanced analytics capability well ahead of its competitors. Case lifecycle management, an attractive user interface, extensive application integration tools, predictive analytics and business rules – in addition to the functionality usually associated with a BPMS makes Pegasystems an attractive alternative for many large businesses.
PNMSoft will be particularly attractive to mid size companies with a commitment to the Microsoft stack of technologies. Its SCE product is a Dynamics CRM BPM software that supports advanced workflows for both horizontal and vertical applications. There is also strong support for SharePoint with Sequence facilitating workflows throughout the organization. Mobile devices are well supported, as is social data – and Sequence is available as a cloud service, either entirely or by selecting various services.
Analytics capability extends to dashboards which display chosen KPIs and a variety of other reporting tools. Unique to PNMSoft is their HotChange technology which allows changes of business workflows in a live environment.
OmniDocs and OmniFlow from Newgen Software Technologies provide a document oriented focus for BPM activities – and particularly customer focused processes. Use is made of components from some open source products, such as Jaspersoft for analytics and the Drools business rule management system.
Support for mobile devices is a feature of the product, and additional products from Newgen (content management and customer focused applications) enhance the capability considerably.
Ultimus BPM Software Suite is an extensive set of integrated tools which address the needs most organizations will have. BPM Studio provides business process design within an easy-to-use collaborative graphical environment. It provides support for business rules, automated tasks (ie. those not requiring human intervention), reporting, process administration, business activity monitoring (BAM) and a centralized process server. Ultimus also provides a wide variety of best practice process templates.