In today’s highly competitive, service-oriented business climate, operational managers and executives demand visibility into the status of their business process networks as they relate to the business key performance indicators (KPIs) in real time. To stay competitive and provide better service operations, managers need ways to analyze emanating application events so they can compute higher-level, complex event aggregates and thresholds that affect the business KPIs, and so they can alert business users with related context to act upon.
For instance, organizations that run distributed global supply chains with Just-in-Time inventory practices must constantly monitor their inventory levels and correlate them to the bill of materials and replenishment requests they’ve sent to their suppliers and logistics partners. They must do this so they can continually make sure they have a balanced flow of parts and inventory throughout their entire supply chain. Similarly, telecommunications companies that provision new services and new customers must continually monitor their provisioning processes that touch hundreds of operational systems to make sure they have an up-to-the minute view of the status of outstanding customer service requests. This paper outlines the types of operational analytics and real-time visibility challenges that organizations face, and the ways that Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Intelligence (BI) tools can help solve these challenges.
