Intelligent Enterprise

Better Insight for Business Decisions

RSS
Webcasts
Whitepapers
Subscribe
Home

July 18, 2003

The Big BAM

Business activity monitoring (BAM) is a key technology concept behind today's "real-time enterprise" sizzle. Will BAM enable you to increase the value of your enterprise resource application investments?

by Stewart McKie

Continued from Page 2

SAP and BAM

SAP is currently working on new functionality to deliver the kind of BAM it thinks its customers need. The good news is that a lot of the heavy lifting has already been done, in terms of the kind of technology stack needed to deliver BAM in a large enterprise, distributed application environment.

The company's mySAP currently offers three levels of monitoring: technical, business process, and business activity. For SAP, an ERP system is an enterprise service in its own right that needs constant monitoring to ensure an optimal service level. In the company's terms, technical monitoring means monitoring the service level delivered by its system via metrics such as transaction throughput, average response time, error rates, and so on. Part of SAP's maintenance contract includes this technical monitoring capability plus the SAP Early Watch Alerts service that delivers emails to system administrators with report attachments to alert them to various aspects of service level status.

BPM is an integral part of SAP's NetWeaver architecture, which encompasses process integration, and depends on a number of specific product and service offerings including SAP WebFlow, SAP Exchange Infrastructure (XI), and SAP Solution Manager. In a NetWeaver scenario, events recognized by workflows are defined in WebFlow trigger messages that can be passed within or across mySAP applications (for example, CRM or SRM) and even across heterogeneous applications coupled in some way to an SAP implementation. These messages can trigger other events or complete workflows within mySAP applications. If messages need to cross SAP applications or reach out to non-SAP systems, then XI can propagate the messages. SAP's Solution Manager tool is the basis for the company's consulting services to execute system and business process automation and optimization projects for SAP customers. SAP has some new BAM functionality in the works but as of June wasn't ready to discuss it publicly.

Oracle and BAM

Kurt Robson, Oracle VP and chief applications architect sees BAM less in terms of business events and more as a way to help deliver what Oracle calls "daily business intelligence": that is, a "snapshot of everything" delivered via personal, role-based Web portals. He's concerned with blurring the line between planning and execution and shortening the distance within complex processes, such as those that begin with demand chain planning in sales and end up as a manufacturing schedule being executed on the shop floor.

Robson claims that the Oracle 9i (release 2) database can now create summary tables optimized for analysis, as well as manage high-volume transaction processing. Therefore, he says it has become practical to deliver BAM from Oracle Applications without the need for separate data warehouses as a staging post. These summary tables, driven by appropriate business logic of course, can be used to keep track of what Oracle calls the "performance measures" required to help with the operational and strategic management of the business. On-screen reports, other types of visual indicators, and email alerts are generated from querying the summary tables to deliver this performance measurement information to customizable role-based portals viewed as Web pages by Oracle Application users.

Oracle's batch job processor creates and refreshes the summary tables, reports, and indicators. Real-time delivery of these performance measures is possible; however, this clearly depends on the trade-off between available computing cycles and the need for timely data. For financial metrics, daily update may be the norm but an hourly update could be required when a quarterly reporting cycle is close to concluding. For Oracle, the road to zero latency is batch-driven.

PeopleSoft and BAM

PeopleSoft sees BAM as an element of its enterprise performance management (EPM) offering, according to Jeff Stiles, director of EPM strategy. The key words at PeopleSoft include content and context; the focus is on how to create analytical context from transactional content. Stiles refers to BAM as something that depends on content sources, rules, and actions, and is delivered via PeopleTools workflow management, PeopleSoft Enterprise Scorecard, and PeopleSoft Context Manager.

In a PeopleSoft scenario, analytical information that's derived from a business activity could be used to support specific activity steps within an activity. Are you creating a new customer? Maybe you need to know the optimal credit terms to give to this type of customer. Are you creating a purchase order? Maybe you need to be able to compare the on-time delivery performance of two competing suppliers. Are you cross- or up-selling on an order? You might need to know the relative profitability of the potential products you can choose from. The availability of this kind of analytic context is what helps every participant in a business process make better decisions, not just managers. By surrounding each step in a business activity with more content and context, PeopleSoft hopes to help users resolve these steps and understand the activity from a more informed basis.

Rate This Article

Comments:

Optional e-mail address:

The Road Ahead

For many other ERP systems, and most targeted at small- to medium-sized businesses, BAM is little more than simple event-driven email alerts or key performance indicator scorecards that aren't necessarily fully integrated with the process events that drive the indicators on show. Even Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP admit they needed to do more to support BAM, which is refreshing. All are convinced of its potential business value for their customers and all have their own distinct spin on what BAM means and how they would deliver it. This might indicate that BAM is more than just another three-letter acronym, which, let's face it, ERP was in the 1990s. BAM really could become fundamental to all enterprise application architectures and help empower not just executives but also every participant in a business process to make better decisions.

Stewart McKie is an independent consultant and technology writer specializing in analytic, enterprise resource management, and Web services applications. Reach him via his Web site at www.cfoinfo.com.