BAM Explodes Into the Mainstream
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FAIRFAX, Va., Aug. 2 / -- webMethods, Inc. (NASDAQ:WEBM), a leading business integration and optimization software company, today announced the publication of a new white paper addressing second generation strategies for Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). Based on the experiences of a number of Global 2000 enterprises, Business Activity Monitoring: The New Face of BPM identifies specific strategies for process assurance, management and improvement that these early adopters have pioneered and implemented within their operations. Using scenario-based examples, it also demonstrates how these strategies can be applied to support a number of strategic business initiatives, including just-in-time manufacturing, business process outsourcing, order-to-cash, deadline and exception management, regulatory compliance, and various process improvements initiatives, such as Six Sigma.
"BAM is the operational dashboard for managing business processes. It provides users with the ability to anticipate and capitalize on business change so that they can better rectify the deficiencies it uncovers while continually optimizing process performance," said James Crump, senior director, Strategic Business Solutions, webMethods, Inc. "As our report demonstrates, BAM isn't simply a tool for measuring process performance. Rather, it's emerging as a fundamental application for shaping process behavior, allowing enterprises to gain greater real-time control over their most critical business processes. By taking a leadership role in working to define these strategies, it is our hope that we can help enterprises more quickly implement these initiatives so that they can further accelerate their time-to-benefit."
According to Gartner, Inc. (Who's Who in Business Activity Monitoring, 4Q05 by Bill Gassman, April 12, 2006), "Business activity monitoring (BAM) is a technology and a technique that provides real-time access to key business metrics. The reasons for deploying BAM are to monitor key business objectives, anticipate operational risks, and reduce the time between a material event and taking effective action. A BAM system works by collecting business events across multiple applications, extracting relevant information from the events to update simple and derived metrics, and using rules to watch the metrics for changes that indicate a threat or opportunity."
By leveraging these capabilities as a component of an overall business process management and business integration strategy, enterprises have implemented a number of new business strategies, including:
o Business Assurance and Visibility - Organizations employ leaner business
models while taking strategic advantage of the ability to outsource
secondary functions through the use of BAM for Service-Level Agreement
(SLA) assurance. In this context, BAM ensures that required process
steps occur on-time as planned with automated alerts highlighting
exceptions. With the addition of statistical modeling, which transforms
observed process behavior into an understanding of what's normal and
what's not, enterprises can also automate the detection of process or
transaction defects, such as faulty orders.
o Control Services - By tying business process execution to assurances
that specific conditions were met, enterprises can further automate
these processes, yielding additional improvements in efficiency. This
same approach is also critical to BAM's use as a platform for automating
regulatory compliance via continuous controls monitoring. In addition,
BAM's ability to regressively prioritize business process steps to meet
specific business objectives "on-the-fly" has proven significant in a
number of key ways, such as in "load-balancing" in-bound traffic to
ensure the optimal use of call center resources.
o Complex Pattern Recognition - While business intelligence tools have
long offered the ability to analyze warehouses of data, they're of far
more limited value in evaluating the real-time implications of
transitory events. That's where BAM steps in with its automated ability
to detect previously unseen relationships between a variety of disparate
factors. As a result, enterprises can more quickly recognize and
respond to changes impacting their operations. At the same time, this
ability to automatically detect and drill down upon cause and effect
relationships is also an important diagnostic tool for process
remediation.
Employing these strategies, a Fortune 500 manufacturer reduced problem orders -- those that required manual intervention or were otherwise rejected - - by 75% while reducing the time it required to correct these problem orders by 85%. Likewise, a major bank used BAM to measurably improve loan capture rates as it was able to further minimize the cycle times associated with its approval process. As another example, a major pharmaceutical company is leveraging BAM to ensure patient safety in the distribution of drugs.
Business Activity Monitoring: The New Face of BPM was developed by the webMethods Strategic Business Solutions group. With expertise spanning multiple industries, they help customers define KPI (key performance indicator) models, process templates, and reporting dashboards for maximizing their BAM investments. In addition, they collaborate with clients on the creation of overarching process improvement strategies that employ BAM and other technologies for achieving key business objectives.
webMethods will also be premiering a webinar Business Activity Monitoring: Your New 'Quality of Life' Tool on Wednesday, August 16th at 9:00 a.m. EDT. In addition to Crump, the program will feature Bill Gassman, Gartner's research director for BAM, and is being moderated by Matt Green, webMethods' Senior Director of Product Management for Business Activity Monitoring.
Visitors can download the report and register for the webinar by visiting webMethods.com/BAM4Business. The webinar will also be made available on- demand for archival rebroadcast.
About webMethods, Inc.
webMethods (NASDAQ:WEBM) provides business integration software to integrate, assemble and optimize available IT assets to drive business process productivity. webMethods delivers an innovative, enterprise-class business integration platform that incorporates proven integration technology with next generation capabilities into one interoperable set of tools that delivers a unique combination of efficiency, agility and control. webMethods combines industry leadership with a zealous commitment to customers to deliver tangible business value to over 1,400 global customers. webMethods is headquartered in Fairfax, Va., with offices throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific and Japan.
Source: webMethods, Inc.
CONTACT:
John Conley of webMethods, Inc.
+1-703-460-5996,
or John.Conley@webMethods.com
Web site: http://www.webmethods.com/
