Process Director

Low-Code Digital Transformation

Kommentare: Process Director has allowed us focus on delivering business solutions that improve our overall customer experience while streamlining operations, increasing accountability and transparency.

Vorteile:

Process Director switches the focus from custom solutions development to business process optimization. The product makes its easy to tackle complex workflows quickly and effectively, allowing us to address evolving business needs without delays. Out of the box integration with Active Directory and built-in connectors to multiple database systems facilitate identity management and data connections to ERP systems or other applications. Full audit logs, report building tools, and digital signatures make compliance requirements a non-issue. The new web form builder not only elevates the end-user's experience, but makes form creation even easier. Forms are responsive and can be created and deployed in no time.

Nachteile:

Process Director will challenge the "developer mindset" who'd like to get underneath the hood to address specific needs. Overcoming this requires you to think differently, and forces you to look at a challenge from different perspectives.

BP Logix Process Director working well for our use case

Kommentare: Overall, it was as expected to ramp up on learning the software, developing the application fro our use case, and making enhancements to the application over time. We were able to achieve the desired results for managing our workflow and crating the various reports needed to manage the biz process and drive continuous improvements.

Vorteile:

Process timeline framework. Technical support. Controlling user access to the level needed. Regular software updates and free training on new features.

Nachteile:

Troubleshooting issues - sometimes finding root cause is difficult. Bug fixes not clearly communicated as to how they were addressed in the next software release.

I found this to be on par with other canned workflow tools. That is, not so great overall.

Vorteile:

If you don't already have a team of coders, but have talented and technically-inclined individuals itching for a new challenge, this may be a good way to enable them to produce simple throwaway forms and workflows. Also found BP Logix tech support to be above average, though product development support is not included in the basic software license.

Nachteile:

Don't believe the marketing hype. No, your staff won't be cranking out complex forms and processes within days, weeks, or probably even months. You will require a substantial training investment and years of experience for workers to become truly productive with this. It is like learning a programming language, except instead of writing code you are mousing everywhere. And, unlike code, which represents the utmost in flexibility, you are working within the limited confines of one tool that does not support such common development tasks as renaming fields, adding more than x number of records to a drop-down, or diffing files to find out what has changed. When your knowledge workers become frustrated trying to accomplish a task for which the tool was not intended--and this will happen for all but the simplest project requirements--you will be tempted to recruit your coding team to assist. This is a good way to alienate your coders, who probably won't want to invest the time learning a tool that is inherently inferior to what they already have and know.

The ultimate sandbox sounds great if you're trying to build a sandcastle.

Vorteile:

The tools are VERY easy to use to get working products and processes, once you get past the learning curve (which, depending on how involved you want to be and where you start, can vary from steep to near vertical). It's largely fun to work with (again, once you know your way around). Seeing your workshopping immediately payoff with a working prototype / final product is very rewarding. The form builder gives you exactly what you need to setup most form types. It too is as simple or complex as you want to make it.

Nachteile:

As I said previously, the versatility in Process Director is both its greatest asset and it's largest downfall. You can make SO many things work, but because of that, the learning curve can be VERY steep unless you have someone holding your hand. Just like you wouldn't write an instruction manual for how to play in a sandbox, it's understandably difficult to codify all the different ways you can work with PD. There is a robust set of documentation, but the largest part of cracking through and finding something USEFUL is knowing WHAT to search for. It's been a while since I was a new user, so it's possible they've improved their onboarding experience with some sort of tailored training, but when I was going through there were a couple of examples, but unless you were looking to build something VERY similar or exactly like the samples, they only helped marginally. Looking back at my journey with the software there are a number of things I would have done differently to better ease myself into the product. Maybe adding a list of things to avoid during your first couple of builds? Things like arrays (having multiple of a section of fields, like multiple vendors for a PO), filling drop downs from other sources, and most custom tasks should probably be avoided. The first couple of processes should be very simple with simple forms (either very few fields or nothing too complicated).

Processing business operations

Kommentare: I like the product and find it easy to build a form, but often get tripped up on some of the data flow features and the jumping around from spot to spot to accomplish what I need. ie. I add a field and then have to go in to form controls to create it's settings for that field. Would like to be able to do that all in one spot.

Vorteile:

I like that through the WYSIWYG editor you can quickly build and create forms and assign each field visibility and access.

Nachteile:

I would like to see a better way of the creating a timeline. Previously there was workflows and I would favor something like a workflow instead. I see the benefits to Timelines, so perhaps a hybrid model may be what is best. Would like to see a way to create better calculations, such as the MEAN of a set of forms answer. Thinking in terms of a rating system form where you could easily calculate the MEAN of the submitted answers