Business Process Management
One example of a business process management product that serves such needs is Celequest’s ActivityServer suite which processes data flowing continuously from transaction systems. It compares standards of performance and the actual metrics to determine when production yields are lower than the norm or alerts store manager when inventory is running low. The standards of performance are determined by comparing historical data in data warehouse with the actual achievements. Brocade Communications uses Celequest’s Activity Server to monitor product yields achieved by its contract manufacturers.
In order to test their strategic assumptions and to be able to see how they play out in practice, company managements need greater visibility into their business processes before they can evaluate the impact of their actions. A recent survey of 300 business-technology executives found that close to 60% of them want greater visibility into their business processes while nearly 80% of them are interested in data on performance metrics. The implication of an interest in visibility of their business processes is that companies are looking for ways to monitor the ebb and flow of business activity and take preventive measures if adverse situations are encountered.
For a closer integration of business process management and analytical capabilities for strategic management, companies need to lower the information and decision latencies to be able to respond to situations in real time. Business Activity Monitoring helps to lower information latencies as it monitors current event data and uses BI to compare it to expected performance. Business Process Management (BPM) software has the tools to make corrections rapidly. For example, customer satisfaction will be affected by call wait time before customer representatives can respond to customer queries. Business Process Management has to be able to use this information to reroute calls to another call center or representative. This would involve the tasks of finding the most efficient alternative route (modeling), ensuring that the traffic flow through alternative routes to proportionate to capacity and the pathways are interconnected (integration).
(BPM), which is designed to work across departments, enables organizations to alter automated and coded processes, without major re-investments in IT, prompted by analysis of event information. At its efficient best, companies will be able to automate marketing by defining customer data in a manner that is consistent with business decision rules and any turn in events will change the approach to marketing campaigns. Software such as Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor, Ilog’s JRules or Pegasystems’ PegaRules are designed to read customer data and change the offers made based on the customer information received.
BPM is intelligible to business users and helps to manage workflows and the process design. The centerpiece of a BPM implementation is the process engine which monitors processes as well as operational and business metrics, watching for exceptions that may require human intervention.