Business Process
One of the benefits of rapid feedback from tactical decisions is business process monitoring (BAM) or the ability to take impromptu actions to remain on course to reach strategic objectives. Portfolio managers, for example, have to be able to makes adjustments in their holdings based on news feeds received. Delta Air Lines monitors the impact of unexpected events, such as weather conditions and gate changes, to alert its employees and to update its gate display systems. This would not be possible unless the analytical and operational systems are not integrated.
Increasingly, business process management software provides a graphical view of the design of workflows as well as progress achieved all on a web site where it is transparent to the entire company. Blue Rhino, a gas distribution company, used business process management to optimize the flow of shipments of full gas tanks, inventories and empty tank returns among the company’s 200 distributor locations. An interlinked inventory tracking system continuously updates data on stocks and obviates the need to manually reconcile the numbers and to issue paper bills of lading. The more advanced BPM software also allows event management and triggers responses as exceptions are recorded such as the actions asset managers need to take following interest rate changes.
IBM’s WebSphere Business Integration Monitor and TIBCO’s BusinessFactor have the capabilities to use transaction data and conduct analytics to find out whether they meet standards and they assess the ability of business processes to facilitate the expected performance metrics. These products can also retrieve historical data from a data warehouse to provide the benchmarks. The more recent acquisitions of these two companies, Alphablox product by IBM, and TIBCO’s OpsFactor, have capabilities to monitor the impact of current events. This would enable companies to analyze the impact of events such as delayed shipments on their financial health.
Business intelligence software needs to be seamlessly integrated with operational data management, business process management and visualization to meet operational objectives. In one survey of users of BI software, it was found that 32% of the respondents consider pre-packaged integration of BI software with existing enterprise applications as one of the most sought after attribute. One instance of such an approach to product offerings is the case of Siebel Business Analytics platform which has web services interfaces that enable it to insert analytical results into Java or .Net and display the results in any application. Furthermore, its analytics are closely intertwined with its CRM packages and directs the workflows for real time information flows.