BPM Reporting Capabilities
Continuing our series on Digital Business Automation and how we can help make a business more efficient and effective, I’m going providing a few articles about a project our team recently put together. This was a proof of concept (POC) project in the loan industry. As we move through this series, I will highlight some finer details of features and design. This particular project was completed using IBM Business Process Management (BPM) and Operational Decision Manager (ODM), along with some external API integration. This video focuses on the mortgage industry; however, we’ve used the tools and methods described here to successfully implement solutions in the financial, manufacturing, retail, medical and many other varied business sectors.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” — not Peter Drucker
Honestly, if I had a dollar for every time someone quoted me some variant of that adage about measuring and managing, I’d be writing this blog post on my yacht. Yet despite the quote’s ubiquity, it’s rarely put to any use other than lip service. In typical software development it is often so challenging to get process automation working properly that getting around to performance improvement falls off the to-do list. But it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the core functions of IBM BPM is providing insight into the performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).
It is simple to add tracking points throughout your business processes and as work is executed, these metrics are captured in the Performance Data Warehouse (PDW). The PDW is a separate database from the one that manages work items, so you can run reports without impacting the performance of your process applications. Access to the PDW can be granted through a SQL client software or reporting software, or you can create reports within BPM for dashboard type metrics. Properly implemented, BPM enables management to get real-time and historical data on process performance that can provide deep insight into places where bottlenecks are occurring, or to identify areas that need additional streamlining.
You can get start times, stop times, calculate the delta between those, capture volume of transactions, averages, and so on. These data are highly customizable and the reporting can be done within your web tools, or through external connectors to off the shelf programs. Reporting may not be as thrilling to end-users as other features of Digital Business Automation, but it provides the tools to prove the efficacy of your solution and to identify places where improvements are needed. In addition to prepared reports with regularly needed metrics, it is also possible to get ad-hoc reporting for processes inside BPM.
Sometimes a software development project struggles to prove it was worth the investment, but with a BPM-based solution the management team can be empowered with robust data to quantify the savings and performance improvements in a visually powerful and statistically accurate manner.
If want to learn how Apex can help your company experience a Digital Business Automation makeover, contact us at info@apexbpm.com or (947) 282–6026.
