Adding Agility to BPM with BAM
As a result of the nature of its use, BAM can accelerate the creation of operational dashboards that monitor case status, transactional change, and historical trends. For the same reasons, the data in the BAM repository can lend itself to being reported on by organizational BI portals or integrated with information from other applications.
For many case management applications, the process is necessarily unscripted, depending on the case circumstances and the worker’s experience and expertise. Under these circumstances, goal-focused performance is the only way to monitor and control activities. BAM enables an organization to set and monitor metric goals (SLAs and KPIs) that are commonly understood and visible to both the performers and supervisors. Decision-making is decentralized and leveraged by the system, but the outcomes are visible and monitored to ensure that they meet the organization’s goals. By linking responsibility and accountability, BAM increases flexibility and reduces the need for close supervision. Properly designed, the BAM metrics should reflect corporate strategy and should be easily rolled up for reporting purposes.
Example: Case Management
Case workers in a multidisciplinary human services agency were responsible for clients with a wide variety of issues, some of which were unique. To review progress and workloads, considerable time was spent in direct supervision and manually compiling periodic reports. By automating case management, the agency was able to isolate administrative and reporting activities and use Documentum xCP’s BAM to report on SLAs for these structured activities, reducing the chances of a case falling through the cracks. Aggregated reports of more involved professional activities enabled the agency to recognize patterns according to case characteristics. Once a consensus was established, exceptions were easily identified and extra resources applied for earlier resolution.
BAM and BI
“I already have BI for reporting via a portal. Why would I need BAM?”
In a BPM system, processes and events can occur at a high rate and under a heavy load. This torrent of business data needs to be captured in real time to report on activities and catch exceptions as they occur, in addition to analyzing trends. Conventional BI and reporting systems are typically not able to do this. A business activity monitor optimized for use with the BPM system is needed. The monitor should support process constructs and semantics out of the box, without the need to build models from more generic applications. It should also enable a non-technical process owner to quickly configure and modify reports and operational dashboards without technical knowledge.
In addition, a requirement for BAM is the ability to combine near-real-time monitoring of in-flight process instances with long-term analysis of trends. Providing both of these critical capabilities in a conventional BI application would be exceptionally complicated, if not impossible.
Like BI tools, BAM can filter, distill and present process data. However, aligning reports to process design and execution is essential for the organization to trust and rely on the information. The reporting system must incorporate a thorough understanding of the process, the explicit involvement of the stakeholders, and a rigorous test of the design that correlates with process outcomes. In addition, when properly designed, BAM will reflect the hierarchical nature of the process and lend itself to aligning the information it presents with the requirements of the user while allowing roll-up or drill-down, as needed.
Finally, as a tightly integrated component of a BPM or case management platform, BAM offers faster setup and configuration of reporting dashboards, automated monitoring of process and case metadata, and reporting that is embedded directly in the application to aid in immediate decision-making and remedial actions.
A major driver for case management and BPM is agility and adaptability not found in commercial off-the-shelf solutions, and for accountability and efficiency not found in traditional paper-based solutions. We know that BPM can make processes faster and more efficient by automating workflow, integrating resources, and supporting rules-based decisions. But speed and efficiency may not be enough. By enabling visibility and awareness, BAM can increase the value of BPM to both the organization and its customer by increasing the consistency of the process outcome and the agility of the process in response to changes. BAM also provides a built-in impetus for continuous improvement.