Business Activity Monitoring
Investment in Information Technology infrastructure creates new possibilities. CRM paved the way for business analytics. In turn, business analytics afforded opportunities for event based business activity monitoring. Even as companies are implementing simple event based business activity monitoring technology, conditions have been created for more complex event based business activity monitoring which enables decision making including pre-emptive actions, based on predictions, which help to avert a crisis or an adverse situation from happening.
An example of more advanced event based monitoring is the action that can be taken in response to news feeds in the financial services industry. A simple event based business activity monitoring would be a stop-loss routine which triggers a sale whenever the price of a stock falls by a given percentage amount. A relatively more complex business activity monitoring would be to monitor trading activity to determine whether the patterns in bids by traders in an auction suggest that they are colluding and are violating SEC regulations. This could go further and rules could be written which help to predict the future performance of the stock and investment decisions are triggered when expected events actually occur.
The use of complex event monitoring is expected to rise with the use of RFIDs when a lot more data is expected to be gathered. Several different applications are possible with the data gathered from the scanning of the codes embedded into products. The obvious application of RFIDs is to monitor trends in inventory depletion. The more important applications would be to monitor the time of delivery by different transportation companies which could be affected by the conditions along the route, the quality of maintenance of vehicles or by the driver’s efficiency. Companies can begin to analyze the data and find better means for routing, loading and unloading techniques as well as data on congestion along the way.
A recurring issue with retailers is out-of-stock items (OOS) which lead to lost sales opportunities. According to a study conducted by Andersen Consulting, 53% of OOS situations happen as a result of poor stocking decisions. Another 8% of OOS situations happen as a result of lags in moving inventory from the warehouse to the shelves. Some pioneers, like U.K. supermarket chain Tesco, have taken the lead in adopting RFID technology to monitor shipments of high-value nonfood goods to avoid OSS.