BPM Proliferation Drives the Need for Process Intelligence
knowledge about their people, processes and information.
To reach these business objectives and gain world-class process competitiveness, organizations must excel in the following strategic areas:
- Visibility—end-to-end visibility to processes that span multiple organizational functions and supporting system infrastructures;
- Alignment—alignment of operational processes with strategic business goals and KPIs;
- Efficiency—identify optimal tradeoffs between time (service level) and cost, as well as identify opportunities to increase utilization of human resources; and
- Agility—react to changing business conditions in real time and ultimately predict and proactively address issues such as service-level degradation.
The aggregation and availability of this process intelligence is key to effectively managing and proactively embracing process change.
Process-intelligence capabilities enable process managers and organizations to measure process execution in real time and auto-adjust priorities based on the declaration of business objectives, such as service-level agreements (SLAs) or other metrics.
Process intelligence involves sophisticated analysis of historical transaction data, but this type of hindsight is simply not enough; actionable process intelligence must provide a real-time view into current process dynamics. Experience has shown that trying to adjust today's processes based on extrapolations from six-month, or six-year, -old process history is an inexact science at best. Instead, business managers need to manage against real-time KPIs and to view the process performance in real time using dashboards, enabling them to identify and compensate for process inefficiencies.
Another promise of process intelligence rests in its predictive capabilities. Managers are best served by the ability to model scenarios to simulate the effect of changed or new processes or the impact of external events and changing business conditions. Accordingly, the aggregation and availability of this information provides them with further insight into future workflow design improvements.
Conclusion: Solving the Real Problem in Process Management
It would be unfair to trivialize the complexity of automating processes. In fact, software vendors still have considerable work to do in order to perfect their offerings. Most BPMS vendors will achieve their success through specialization. Thus, organizations will inevitably have to contend with the challenge of managing multiple process engines. Consequently, Process Intelligence will quickly prove to be an even more strategic technology than BPM Suites for the "process aware" organizations striving to improve their business performance.
The Global 360 Approach to Process Intelligence
Global 360 has developed its Business Optimization Server (G360 BOS) to enable businesses to capture and leverage process intelligence in the following three distinct perspectives: historical, real-time, and predictive.
Historical Process Intelligence
G360 BOS provides historical process intelligence enabling business professionals to gain end-to-end process visibility, even for processes that span multiple departments and are supported by different software applications. G360 BOS enables organizations to understand the duration or cycle time to complete the overall process, as well as which activities take the most time to perform. Within each activity, visibility is extended so that analysts and managers may understand how much time people spend performing work versus waiting on work. Cost information is also overlaid upon the process, enabling organizations to directly impact the bottom line. Because Global 360 BOS is based on a multi-dimensional data repository, information may be filtered and "sliced" by any number of process specific parameters (i.e., loan amount, employee, region, etc.). This architecture allows a single, consistent information source to be used as the basis for decision making at all levels within the organization. It also enables organizations to align process measurement and behavior with corporate goals and their supporting technologies, including balanced scorecards and other business intelligence initiatives.
Real-Time Process Intelligence
G360 BOS provides real-time process intelligence to enable business professionals to identify issues in real time and adapt to changing business conditions. G360 BOS proactively monitors process objectives and metrics known as KPIs. Decisions may be made in the context of KPI performance last hour, but also within the context of the last week, month or even year when making decisions about corrective actions.
Predictive Process Intelligence
In addition to historical and real-time perspectives, G360 BOS provides predictive process intelligence capabilities. Organizations can model various "what-if" scenarios based on existing process definitions, often referred to as the "as is" process or the proposed process, often known as the "to be" process. Business analysts can identify process bottlenecks and improve process efficiency, or model external events that may impact business continuity and/or changes in resource availability. G360 BOS may also be used as a powerful solution for performing ROI analysis associated with BPM and other related projects, providing an increased level of assurance that expected benefits will be realized.
For more information about Global 360's BPM solutions, please call 1-214-520-1660 or visit
www.global360.com.