Great addition to the IBM suite, not worth it as a standalone
September 22, 2021

Great addition to the IBM suite, not worth it as a standalone

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Blueworks Live

Blueworks Live is used as a business process modeler and management platform. It is generally forced onto customers on any large project that is led by IBM, since this is their standard solution for process modelling and helps their team deploy predefined templates and practices - as well as accelerating the project time-to-market.

Pros

  • Out-of-the-box integration with the IBM Suite
  • Intuitive and easy-to-use for any business analyst
  • Lots of options to work with Microsoft products

Cons

  • Pricing is prohibitive for any non-Large Enterprise customer
  • User experience is very dated
  • Not a true BPMN2 modeler so you'll have a hard time migrating to another solution later on
  • Improved time-to-market on IBM-led projects
  • Definitely not a tool we could use post-project (price, dated interface)
  • Dangerous decision to lock-in your processes with a non-universal format
Blueworks Live has all the standard process management capabilities you would expect from it. Any business process you build can be easily shared with others and has its own lifecycle (draft, approved, etc.). You can easily sort and order them in a structured process hierarchy, and version everything the way you like it. There are also numerous import/export functionalities that allow you to quickly start building your repository.
Collaboration features work great. The user administration is quite simple, and users don't need much training or ramp-up to be able to start the work. You can easily identify who works on which process, whether they are completed (e.g., from draft to released) as well as suggest changes. Everything is handled on a single platform.
The biggest challenge was to deliver the project in time and on-budget. Blueworks Live helps centralizing processes and documentation, as well as providing traceability and audit facts. It's always better to document your way up to deployment, which is helped by the tool through process modeling, process management and strong collaboration features.
  • IBM Cloud Foundry
  • IBM Cloud Functions
  • IBM Cloud SAP-Certified Infrastructure
  • IBM Workload Automation
  • IBM Watson Language Translator
  • IBM Watson Natural Language Classifier
The IBM Suite is definitely a good accelerator for your projects. The single biggest benefit is how easy for users it is to jump from one platform to another. Administrators also get a lighter workload, and great support from IBM itself. It is really shining on IBM-led projects for Large Enterprises.
Blueworks Live was part of a project deal. We did not keep it after the project. We found there are many solutions offering similar or superior capabilities - the fact that Blueworks does not fully support the universal BPMN standard was a big letdown for us. The pricing also did not make sense as a standalone solution.

Do you think IBM Blueworks Live delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with IBM Blueworks Live's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM Blueworks Live live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of IBM Blueworks Live go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IBM Blueworks Live again?

No

It's hard to recommend a tool that does not follow the universal industry standard (BPMN2). Like Visio, it looks and feels like the standard is respected (shapes, naming convention, etc.) but Blueworks Live does not in fact follow any of it. It is a good tool for any company that is primarily looking at drawing diagrams (e.g., export them as images), as opposed to building live processes.

IBM Blueworks Live Feature Ratings

Process designer
7
Process simulation
4
Business rules engine
4
SOA support
4
Process player
4
Support for modeling languages
4
Form builder
4
Model execution
4
Social collaboration tools
7
Dashboards
6
Standard reports
6
Custom reports
5
Content management
7

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