Business Intelligence and Business Process Management
Business Intelligence Systems
Business Intelligence (BI): BI’s purpose is to collect data and generate information and KPIs to monitor businesses and measure the impacts of strategies, process optimizations, and project implementations. Business Analytics (inductive method) is used to extract information from diverse data, encompassing data mining and big data, without standardization or prior hypotheses.
Why Business Intelligence?
ERPs often include a BI module or provide data for analysis, aiming to respond to tactical and strategic information demands. The tactical level differs from the operating level by the following features:
- Immediate availability of management information.
- Processing of information to increase the capacity for analysis and decision-making.
- The data, processes, and results vary depending on the user and the period when the information is requested.
Information systems support the stages in the strategic level:
- They aid by structuring preliminary information, assessing challenges, achieving targets, and gathering financial data, along with analysis and strategic discussion phases.
- They aid strategic deployment decisions in complex environments, providing a global view and simulation of scenarios to consider variables and make informed decisions.
- They enhance strategic and operational stages by automatically monitoring compliance with objectives, actions, and operations while monitoring KPIs for business success.
Characteristics of BI Solutions
- Orientation towards a non-technical user with natural terms in its operating language.
- Intuitive operation, suitable for occasional users with little time for analysis (reduce users’ time and effort).
- Standardized functions and use across the applications. Entering, closing, and moving around should be the same for all users.
- Maximum exploitation of visual information.
Basic Functions of BI Systems
- Real-time extraction, consolidation, and display of the key internal and external variables that management must monitor.
- Display historic information and trends, supply reports on incidents, and provide warning mechanisms that detect deviations in the variables.
Business Process Management Systems (BPMS)
Workflow systems have evolved into BPMS, which is an approach to business management that aims to improve an organization’s productivity and efficiency by optimizing its business processes. A BPM offers tools to model and visually design business processes without going into detail about databases and programming, because it assumes that the process is supported by applications that are already in use, to carry out specific activities within the process itself.
Advantages of BPMS
- They are flexible and can adapt easily and efficiently to changes that affect the business processes.
- Makes it possible to analyze, design, automate, implement, and control business processes.
- They don’t replace pre-existing systems or add additional applications.
The development of BPMs must be based on the definition of the processes involved, with study of structures and identification of the tasks performed to establish the rules that will automate and computerize execution. The BPMs include tools to design processes by creating diagrams of complex information procedures (graphic representations).
Sub-processes in BPMS
- Personal tasks: The tasks that users have to carry out can be defined throughout the whole course of the process (data, documents, instructions, recommendations).
- System tasks: The system must perform these tasks without human intervention (notifications, data entry…).
- Business rules (gates): Set the rules under which the process and its tasks should advance.
- Control point object (events): They allow online monitoring of the development of the processes.
Essential Factors When Deploying BPM Applications
- User participation and management in process design: The owners must ensure that users are engaged in validating the data and information processes and they can identify problems, suggest modifications…
- Automatic conversion of modeling to process performance: Modeled by the process owner in the IT application to a process that can be directly run without the need of IT technicians.
- Integration with the organization’s IS environment: BPM tools are intended to coexist and integrate with the company’s IS, obtaining information from them for modification and aggregation.