Driving Business Process Improvements with Real-Time Analytics
Imagine that your company is growing fast, putting you in constant hiring mode. You need to find an outstanding candidate to fill a very important managerial role within your organization. Would you hire a candidate who had no experience? Probably not.
Why should choosing a business process management (BPM) system be any different?
Organizations turn to BPM technology to manage and orchestrate high value-added business processes. These processes span a range of activities, from business activity monitoring and regulatory compliance; to collaborative applications like content development; to transactional applications like purchasing and capital acquisitions; to value chain applications like customer and supplier relationship management. In all of these cases, BPM acts as a business facilitator, controlling interactions between individuals, organizations and existing enterprise applications or databases.
Like any successful business manager, an effective BPM system (BPMS) must be intelligent. It should be able to respond flexibly to changing business conditions. It needs to keep employees informed and help them make good decisions. It must deliver accurate, timely reporting on business operations under its control.
The key to intelligent business process management is integrated analytics technology. Analytics applied to historical process performance and tied to business rules enables "active optimization™" of enterprise processes. In conjunction with personalization technology, it delivers critical context to human decision makers. And, through dashboards, it provides executives with relevant, real-time operational data.
Unfortunately, most business process management technologies fall short when it comes to analytics, and, by extension, management intelligence. The root cause of this is product architecture.
Analytics Starts With Architecture
Traditionally, architectural constraints have handicapped the analytical intelligence of BPMSs. As a result, most BPM vendor analytics offerings fall short in two significant areas:
- First, analytics are not "real-time." Of the BPM vendors that do provide analytics capabilities, most rely on external database cubes which are inherently disconnected from the system's process engine. Because they are periodically batch-loaded with new process data, they rarely contain records of the most recent process activities. In many cases, BPM vendors actually rely on third-party business intelligence providers for their analytics, passing on the cost of this additional software to their customers.
- Secondly, most BPM technologies have limited analytical capabilities that focus on process data—for example, determining the average time it takes an individual employee to perform a task, or the average task burden of a particular functional team. Appian's analytical features extend to support business data managed by the system. In a loan approval process, for example, a loan officer or business analyst can invoke the analytical functionality to see the real-time outstanding value of all offered but-not accepted loans. Business data, in many cases, is far more critical than process data for analyzing and optimizing business processes. In the loan approval process example, the outstanding real-time value of offered-but-notaccepted loans, correlated to historical loan acceptance rates, is critical data for managing hedges in real-time.
Delivering Analytics—Context and Personalization
These architectural limitations are compounded in most BPMSs by a technical failure to deliver analytical data to the people who need it most, when they need it most.
If a manager is tasked with approving a vacation request for employees, the task that a BPMS routes to him should include more data than just information about that particular vacation request. It should include historical information concerning the employee's past vacations, information on the employee's remaining vacation days and any overlap or conflict with previously approved vacations for other employees in the department. By delivering this analytical context to the individual task, an intelligent BPMS enables a manager to make a better business decision.
There are some critical requirements necessary for delivering relevant, contextual analytics to knowledge workers. First, the BPMS' process modeling environment must be equipped to call analytics functionality as a service. Most BPMSs struggle to deliver this level of integration because, as described above, the analytics engines in those systems are fundamentally and architecturally separate from the process management environment. Secondly, presentation technology must exist in order to deliver rich, graphical analytics directly into the task management interface. (Appian solves this problem by employing advanced AJAX technology—asynchronous JavaScript and XML, used in well-known interactive Web apps like Google Maps, making charts and graphics drillable, dynamic and contextual to the end user.)
From a management standpoint, personalization technology and a flexible presentation layer are necessary for building and deploying effective executive dashboards. Most BPMSs fail to integrate these technologies, resulting in static, pre-configured management dashboards that do not provide real-time visibility into critical business processes and operations.
Advanced BPMSs leverage personalization and portal technologies in conjunction with real-time analytics, to deliver advanced executive reporting capabilities. First, charts, tables and graphs detailing both process and business performance are created in a powerful analytics environment. Once created, these reports can be saved and published. Both process designers and business users can then build composite portal pages comprised of one or many of these reports. These composite pages, and the individual reports within the pages, can all be targeted based on the viewer's security access and organizational role. All pages and reports are drillable and dynamic, and are automatically updated to reflect real-time system activity. Configurable drillpaths ensure that access to the right business data is never more than a mouse click away. In-flight process modification can be triggered directly from these reporting interfaces, enabling true "round-trip" business process optimization. The net result is a powerful yet flexible personalized executive reporting application for both mid- and executive-level management.
In short, one chart with the right information is worth 10 charts with the wrong information. Personalization technology is critical for enabling contextual delivery of business data to knowledge workers, business managers and executives.
Real-time Analytics + Rules = Active Optimization
Real-time analytics achieve their true potential and are especially powerful when coupled with an integrated rules engine. Process designers can feed real-time business and process analytics into a rules environment to create and deploy intelligent processes that, in effect, learn from experience. Appian refers to the technology for deploying these self-optimizing business processes as "active optimization."
Active optimization brings unparalleled new intelligence to BPM. Historically, rules technology has been constrained by its data inputs. Data flowing into a rule has been limited to data specific to the individual process that is running (for example, the individual credit score of a loan applicant in a loan process), or to a predefined table of information. With active optimization, rules can be applied to "live" historical data across any time horizon.
A simple application of active optimization is intelligent task routing. Imagine that help desk tasks are normally handled by a core group of agents. If the average task burden of the group rises above a level that the group has historically been able to support, service levels could be maintained by automatically routing task overflow to a thirdparty call center operator. Alternatively, the intelligent system might handle the additional workload by dynamically expanding the pool of people who are routed help-desk tasks to include people in the organization whose core function is not customer support (e.g., consultants who aren't on an active project). If the average call volume for a particular product rises above seasonal historic averages, a new process could even be automatically triggered to investigate a potential product issue.
A more complex application of active optimization could be dynamic response to changes in retail supply and demand. A BPMS with active optimization capability could be used by an online retailer to track and manage inventory. By developing pricing rules based on historical consumer behavior, a process designer could deploy a process that would adapt the pricing of every SKU to the market in real time. The result? Profit maximization and optimal inventory management.
This concept of active optimization is highly complementary to traditional concepts of "round-trip" process management, or continuous process improvement. Round-trip process management encompasses the definition, deployment, analysis and improvement of a business process over time. Once a process is initially defined and deployed through a BPMS, the performance of that process is analyzed. This is where traditional analytics functionality is applied. Based on analysis and simulation, the process can then be adjusted and redeployed, improving the general performance of that process going forward. This cycle is applied continuously, ensuring that business processes are constantly evolving and improving over time.
Active business process optimization complements this cycle. By deploying processes that leverage active optimization technology, organizations create an additional self-running loop of process optimization within every deployed process. Essentially, by applying business rules (the "intelligence" of the system) to analytical data (the "experience" of the system), organizations can deploy self-adapting processes that automatically deliver a process change that is normally only achievable by having a person manually modify the underlying process model. The end result is a process management environment that reacts faster to changing business conditions without the human intervention typically associated with continuous process improvement efforts.
The Next Evolution of BPM
It's been said that by abstracting out process logic from enterprise applications, BPM represents an important advance over traditional packaged software. Process abstraction enables cost-effective continuous process improvement, where managed processes are continuously refined and optimized over time. Analytics is a critical element of this basic process of continuous improvement.
Analytics is also fundamental to achieving BPM's next evolutionary leap—the deployment of processes that effectively learn from experience and react in realtime to changes in the business environment. To enable true "active optimization" of business processes, BPM solution providers need to break their dependency on external, third-party business intelligence providers. They must embrace an advanced, in-memory architecture that can scale to support real-time, enterprise-wide business and process analytics.
Narrowing the Field
When it comes to selecting a BPMS, look for strong analytics features that include:
- An integrated in-mamory analytics engine
- Support for both business and process data
- Personalization features enabling contextual application
- Dynamic, drillable graphics directly linked to process change capability
- Support for active optimization™ linking rules and analytics
Organizations looking to select a BPM technology platform should rank analytics capability as a core feature in their selection criteria. Analytics enable both the active "management intelligence" of a BPM system and ultimately define that system's ability to support continuous process improvement. As such, analytics are integral to the long-term value proposition of any BPM system.
Appian is the first business process management (BPM) company to deliver advanced process, knowledge, and analytics functionality in a fully integrated suite. Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations are deploying Appian's award-winning software, Appian Enterprise, to drive continuous, quantifiable process improvements and to build next-generation, composite process applications and solutions. With more active seats deployed than any other vendor, Appian is the industry's leading provider of BPM software and solutions. Additional information is available at (
www.appian.com).