BAM: Process Visibility for Better Decision Making
by Amy Larsen DeCarlo

In an increasingly complex and competitive global marketplace, aligning IT with business goals has to be a priority for organizations in virtually every industry. Companies expect their technology investments to pay off through greater operational efficiencies, responsiveness and profitability. Accomplishing this return requires organizations to connect their IT resources with the business side of the house.

For many organizations, this is exactly where business process management (BPM) comes into play. BPM provides the structure to effectively integrate processes and improve orchestration among these activities to fuel high-performing corporate operations. To get the maximum benefit from BPM, businesses must understand the role myriad processes play in their operations and then assess exactly how those processes can be improved on with IT and non-technical resources.

But far too many organizations find out after the fact that the process complexity associated with business activities clouds their visibility into the underlying processes that power these operations. Many companies lack a good understanding of exactly which key performance indicators (KPIs) can help them gauge when there might be an issue that would impact a critical operation such as their supply chains or manufacturing facilities.

This lack of clarity can be a game ender for a business, slowing growth, innovation and response times to a crawl, and leading to customer dissatisfaction and diminished competitiveness.

So how can an organization get a handle on its processes? For many businesses, the answer is business activity monitoring (BAM), which sheds light on components that can make or break business performance. IBM leads the way in the BAM arena with its WebSphere Business Monitor, an integral part of the company’s BPM suite, which supplies a real-time view of business performance based on process information collected from applications and other event sources. This view gives organizations the information they need to understand how well various components are performing so that they can fine tune processes and quickly resolve problems.

WebSphere Business Monitor delivers a graphical picture of the activity on key applications and operations (such as the supply chain). Users can construct their own KPIs based on specific business examples. For example, a banker can drill down to get performance indicators on loan size and loan disbursement time. IBM has enhanced the WebSphere Business Monitor application dashboard to give business and IT professionals more relevant real time information to help them make better decisions. Users can customize the interface to drill down on specific activities and associated KPIs associated to understand how well processes are running with respect to their service-level agreements. The dashboard features a series of gauges, bars and score cards that show how well KPIs are performing in accordance with targets. Users can also receive alerts when KPIs reach a particular threshold.

An effective BAM package can go a long way toward help businesses master the challenge that plagues businesses that lack both real understanding of business processes performance and the confidence that the right targets are being watched. KPIs associated production, supply chain, and so on are critical to help identify and prevent production outages, backloads and bottlenecks, supply chain disruption, slow response times or ineffective personnel allocation. The result is the kind of perspective organizations need to identify inefficiencies, make the appropriate corrections and minimize issues that can that create larger and more expensive problems.

In the end, BAM can make all the difference between a costly mistake and the opportunity to construct a responsive and efficient business.

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