IBM Operational Decision Manager is presented as a comprehensive decision automation solution that helps users discover, capture, analyze, automate and govern rules-based business decisions, on premises or on cloud. It is formerly known as the IBM Websphere Operational Decision Management, and before that as the ILOG JRules Business Rules Management System (BRMS).
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Oracle BPM Suite
Score 8.5 out of 10
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The Oracle Business Process Management Suite is an integrated environment for developing, administering, and using business applications centered around business processes.
IBM Operational Decision Manager can be used to manage complex business processes with less use of IT infrastructure and more use of centralized decision making. Decision-making depends on a logical framework and the creation of commands for better futuristic decisions with less time consumption and more precision and accuracy. IBM's Operational decision manager application is well suited for such scenarios where complex processes have to be streamlined.
Oracle BPM is well suited to organizations and environments that have a good understanding of their business processes and organizational structures. Trying to introduce a tool such as Oracle BPM into the organization without a good grasp on how the business operates is a recipe for disaster as the implementation will uncover all of the dirty secrets of an organizations business processes and bring them to light. BPM is not to be utilized for smaller service orchestrations or technical service implementations, these should be handled by the Oracle SOA Suite using the BPEL process manager, leaving BPM to handle the organizational business processes, referring to and including lower level services and BPEL processes as needed.
Oracle BPM is left behind by other tools more modern in terms of user experience, usability and ability to integrate with everything else.
To really harvest the potential of Oracle BPM you need to do it in JDeveloper and with ADF. This restricts its usage to very technical people.
The administration of the Oracle BPM tools has really put a burden on our team. It is running on Weblogic and we experience issues very often either with performance or with a bad configuration of the system.
As with all Oracle products, the price can be an issue for smaller shops.
When compared to other vendors in the business rule management system, IBM Operational Decision Manager stands out in dimensions of rule engine capabilities, deployment flexibility, and ease of maintenance. It offers a wide spectrum of configuration options to build applications that can be used by developed by technical and non-technical/business users.
We evaluated Bonita and found that it might fit a smaller-sized company better; we found that Oracle BPM Suite scaled much more evenly. We almost went with one of the competitors, but in the end chose Oracle BPM Suite after we factored in the cost of VMware licensing. There are literally tons of analytics on the back end which are great for upper management, but not so much for average users, but this fits our business model quite well.
It has a positive impact as it provides a great way to define business rules, execute them, update them, manage different versions of rules.
Depending on the complexity of the applications, you can have thousands of rules.
It provides a nice way to test the rules, run simulations with different scenarios, different scales of requests and verify the decisions, performance, etc., and that helps a lot.
Since the decisions can be exposed through REST interface, it makes it very convenient to integrate with different applications, applications using different technologies.
The Business console makes it easy for business users to be able to define, modify rules and not have to depend on IT to do a lot of that work. This helps in bringing the time to change and use the rules to be very short as well as lets IT do more IT related tasks and provide better value to the organization.
You'll most certainly need a deep dive and extensive training before your users can even think of using the product and they are very expensive.
Lack of documentation makes it very difficult to manage the application if any error is encountered which will result in you ending up hiring a dedicated person to look into the application once it's deployed.
For a very large org., if properly implemented and used, it can help identify the cost-intensive and inefficient processes.