Matjaž Kosmač (2012) Comparing BPM suite K2 Blackpearl and IBM Business process manager. EngD thesis.
Abstract
The thesis brings a comparison of two significant BPM tools called K2 Blackpearl and IBM Business Process Manager, also known as Lombardi. At the beginning we had to identify key criteria to evaluate BPM tools and divide them into larger sets. Afterwards we described how the chosen BPM tools fulfill important criteria in each of these sets. We came to the conclusion that both tools are quite similar, both offering similar (basic) functionalities and features, but often in very different ways. K2 Blackpearl is more user friendly, suitable even for non-technical personnel, easy to use, supported by numerous wizards to help the user. It often depends largely on Microsoft systems and tecnologies. Lombardi is a more extensive and comprehensive tool. It offers many different possibilities for achieving the same result, which makes Lombardi even more independant tool. This is the main difference between these two tools, when ignoring the costs. When choosing BPM tool, a lot depends on us and our company, our demands and our expectations, platform and systems currently used at our company and the money we are willing to spend on BPM tools. Out of the many functionalities and features of the BPM tool, we have to recognize and select only important ones, and neglect others, if possible. Often we even do not need to use all functionalities but only a small set. To conclude the project, we built our own order management system for internal use, as such systems are often used by various companies. Thus we wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to build such a system and get the same results with a less acclaimed and less comprehensive tool such as K2 Blackpearl. We chose these two tools for comparison based on their importance to IBM and Microsoft, two leading computer software companies in the world.
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