Business Process Management. Process is the Enterprise.

Chapter 6: Business Process Monitoring and Exception Management

Preface Table of Contents Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Appendix-BPM Product greatest needs

     CEOs, CFOs, and almost all business managers want to see where they're in real time. There's incredible value in having knowledge about the state of your business processes in real-time. Whether you run the business process as an enterprise or consume the business process as a customer process visibility is a win-win proposition. Process visibility lets the consumers see what is happening to their order request or service request in real time. For the business managers and process owners process visibility enables to see how business operations are running, provides critical information to understand customer needs, assess organizational strengths and weaknesses, respond to market conditions and improve their business processes. Process visibility is key to optimizing business operations.
     Business environment is changing at such a rapid pace that it is impossible to build the most optimized and fault proof business process in the first shot. While working on BPM projects I have experienced business rules and processes change under my feet just after process deployment to production. No matter how good the BPM design team is, it is impossible to design perfect business process as change is constant. What is needed is to have a mechanism to proactively monitor running business process in real-time to ensure operations are running effectively and manage problems before they arise and after they arise. Ongoing process management and exception management provide visibility and control over your processes. Exception management refers to taking corrective action when a business process deviates from its correct path or stops moving all together. Figure 6.1 shows the process management phase in business process lifecycle.
     Business process monitoring today is done by business intelligence reporting and alerts and notifications. Business intelligence reports are an array of reports produced by IT for the management which depict how the business has been running. These are sub-optimal ways for process monitoring. Real time monitoring does exist in some of today’s IT applications, but these monitoring systems do not provide the required end-to-end process information needed. Most of the existing IT applications send out alerts and notifications when certain data changes or when certain events are triggered in systems. These alerts and notifications are useful for the operations people but business users cannot derive much business value out of these notifications and alerts. Table 1.1 depicts the difference between the monitoring and exception management approaches in BPMS and today’s cluster of applications.
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Business Process Monitoring
     Business process monitoring is required to make sure the business process in running effectively and is a prerequisite for continuous process improvement. You cannot improve a process which is opaque and cannot be measured. In order to improve processes, businesses must first understand where the bottlenecks are.

Without BPMS companies use sub-optimal techniques to monitor their operations which can be summed up as “Silo functional monitoring” and “Silo alerts and notification”. Basically monitoring in most companies is done at the functional level.

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     BPM product must have process performance tools which display process metrics in a graphical fashion using dashboards and process reports. A dashboard is nothing but simply a mechanism to display process metric data in a graphical fashion (charts, graphs, plots, etc) rather than in excel spreadsheets so that it’s more intuitive. BPM performance tools must provide the core functionality to enable fast, easy and low-cost creation and reporting of an organization's process metrics.
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Exception Management
     Without BPMS companies are always in fire fighting mode. That is the result of the rigid and brittle IT infrastructure created over the years. I have spent over 13 years in software industry, and my experience is IT spends 80% of resources in software maintenance. When business changes or there are issues with existing application bugs are logged, triaged, assigned and fixed.
     Teams simply solve the problem at hand, without process insights. Teams implement minor improvements at best and never measure results. The symptoms go away, but underlying problems resurface in other parts of the process. Fire fighting efforts have no impact of process improvement. BPM will help companies move from fire fighting mode to exception management mode.
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... Exception is a deviation from the "optimal" (or agreed and acceptable) process execution path that prevents the delivery of services with the desired (or agreed) quality with maximum efficiency. Exceptions can create business disputes, generate strategy and financial risk, create significant back-office expense and can damage relationships with the customer.

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