Process Intelligence: The Next Leap Forward in Business Intelligence - and Intelligent Business

Improve the effectiveness of a process.An organization can identify exactly where waste, inefficiencies and loss (in time, effort and resources) are occurring throughout a process and take timely action to mitigate these obstacles and bottlenecks. For example, a hospital can find answers to how long a patient is in each step of an emergency room visit, a financial institution can know how many mortgage applications are currently waiting at each step, or an organization can know what percentage of invoices followed the prescribed process path and why. Some of the questions are best addressed by using an overview of the entire process. In other cases, understanding how subsets of process instances behave will provide better insight into how well the processes are being executed and where opportunities for improvement exist.

Determining how often the recommended process flow is followed (process compliance). Process intelligence identifies when and where exceptions to the expected or prescribed process occur, for example when activities are skipped completely, done out of order or repeated. This analysis needs to be highly interactive and allow the user to drill down into the process data to gain a deeper understanding of the operation. By understanding how many exceptions occur at each step, analysts can better understand the areas in which to focus and make fact-based personnel or process changes.

A truly complete BI platform will also deliver process intelligence that enables operational insights into process performance and compliance, based on actual operational data gathered from each instance of a process. This new analytic depth, down to the process level, is an absolute must-have in order to achieve new levels of efficiency, effectiveness, and compliance – breakthroughs that may well remain undiscovered using other BI tools.