Do You Like Your Workflow or BPM Software?

Dukhat asks: "I am really interested in firsthand experiences with these kinds of products and in unbiased reviews, since Google primarily gives me marketing information and vague overviews of how BPM is good for business. I have already looked at an earlier article on work-flow patterns, which gave me a few products to look at. I am trying to compile a short list of work-flow and BPM software to evaluate, but I am having a hard time determining which products are even worth evaluating. The situation is worsened by the fact that work-flow tools are often bundled with CRM or Business Intelligence packages. I am not dead set on using a big package, but I need to know more about their real world pros and cons before I can decide whether to build it myself instead. I am looking at both BPM and work-flow software, since some BPM software can also do work-flow, but it may be more worthwhile to just use a rules engine for automated processes and use a specialized work-flow tool." Dukhat has a fairly long list of software choices that he needs to whittle down. What packages would you recommend and why?

"Here are some of the goals we have that we are trying to solve with work-flow/ BPM software:

• To be able to understand the path of a process without perusing in and out of a lot of functions.
• To be able to report on how long each step in each process takes.
• To be able to see exactly where in the process software errors occur and be able to skip over failed steps so that we can come back and fix them later.
• To be able to integrate with our issue tracking system, billing system, and CRM software. We definitely will have to write some webservices here.
• To be able to give process managers in different departments the ability to tweak certain processes without giving them full access to all processes.

We started off looking at rules engines, but it looks like a rules engine would only be useful for choosing actions at each step in the process, but we would have to glue together each step in the process ourselves. A lot of BPM software includes business rules software or is designed to integrate easily with specific packages.

Here is a list of packages that I have assembled so far:

• JBoss jBPM & Rules
• ILOG JViews & JRules
• webMethods & Blaze Advisor
• Oracle BPEL Process Manager
• COSA
• FLOWer
• Microsoft BizTalk
• Lotus Workflow
• Global360 BPM
• Bizflow
• WebSphere MQ Workflow
• Tibco BPM
• Fujitsu Interstage
• FileNet BPM
• Savvion
• Pegasystems
• BEA AquaLogic with Fuego

Please help me narrow these down. Thanks!"