Business Activity Monitoring and Management
Panel Session Summary Draft
Event Processing Symposium
March 14-16, 2006
Eric Wayne, IBM (on behalf of six panelists)
ewayne@us.ibm.com
BAM Panelists
Panelist
Affiliation
Richard Brooks
ISO New England
(Electric Energy Market)
Rohn Griggs
Wachovia
(Banking - Retail Loan Origination)
Harpal Kochar
Oracle
(Cattles plc, UK – High Risk Loan)
Vaikom Krishnan
Celequest
(Food Manufacturer)
Anthony Lopresti
Systar
(Shipping Logistics)
Karsten Schwan
Georgia Tech
(Delta Airlines)
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Event Processing Symposium
Summary– Common Elements
 Industries: Energy, Financial Services, Manufacturing/Logistics, Shipping/Logistics
 Integration of BAM with other software in customer environment
– BPM, rules engine, packaged apps, legacy/custom apps,
– System Management,
– Business Intelligence
 Recurring use cases
– Track and trace
– Process visibility spanning apps and silos
– *External partners – where control leaves enterprise – key visibility pain point
– Dashboards/alerts, detection of patterns representing an issue or situation
– Impact of system events on business
– Anticipate problems
 Range of event volume metrics. Range of analysis, correlation techniques.
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Event Processing Symposium
ISO New England –
Electric Energy Market.
Monitor systems and
processes to anticipate
problems before they
occur. Prevent repeat of
occurrence when trading
stopped.
Wachovia – Retail Loan
Origination
Characteristics: Roles consuming, Techniques
Value / Benefits –
Measurable improvement
(or clear problem solved)
Issues / Wish
list
Roles: Business Users, IT responsible for
availability performance, problem determination.
Reaction time
Future Intent:
Promote as a
standard
approach to
community
IRC/ITC.
*Use of common information model and common
base event for integrated logging across systems,
built on top of an EAI system.
Visibility to events that might
impact trading
Example process: Person update across systems.
*Technique: Use of AptSoft Director for CEP and
Dashboards.
Roles: Business Process Owner
SLA controls and alerts
State: Requirements/Scorecard, Now in POC stage
with chosen vendor
End to end view of retail
lending process
Managed and unmanaged processes.
BPM enabler – decrease
cycle time, customer sat. If
cut time by 1 hour, can save
$10K’s monthly.
* Pain point: insight into activities performed by
external vendors and suppliers – e.g. document
imaging, closing package to atty’. Look for missing
event of document being returned before deadline.
Rules are sensitive to geography.
Lesson learned:
need strong
sponsorship &
education.
Creating a BAM
CoE leveraging
the BPM/EAI
CoE’s in place
now.
Integration with EAI/BPM. Non-intrusive as key
element.
Cattles, plc, UK
High Risk Loan
Origination/Customer
Acquisition
(Oracle presenter)
Roles: “Paranoid” Operations Managers, Financial
Managers
Process automation and
optimization.
* Integration with EAI/BPM and Rules System –
including invocation of process from dashboard.
Grow through alliances with
visibility.
BAM to monitor straight-through-processing.
Quicker reactions.
Monitor effectiveness of rules.
4
* Business metrics and IT metrics in dashboard.
Issue: Having
consistent time
dimension with
events from
multiple
application
systems required
specific
programming.
Event Processing Symposium
Trucking/Logistics
Improve delivery chain
efficiency
Characteristics: Roles consuming,
Techniques
Value / Benefits – Measurable
improvement (or clear
problem solved)
Roles: Plant Managers. Rolling out to 1000
named users (now 100)
Identify problems in operation –
make corrections to improve fill
ratio/order miss.
Goal: Increase percentage of “perfect orders.”
KPIs: Fill Ratio, Order Miss
Visibility to inefficient areas of
delivery chain.
Hotel – effectiveness of
web sales channels
About 8 major events pertaining to trucks,
palettes.
Analyze root cause of problems.
(Celequest presenting)
Technique: Use of streaming database for
“operational business intelligence”
International shipping and
logistics - support of
Canadian regulatory
security compliance
Problem: packages into Canada must have
airbill processed by Canadian customs before
the package departs from US. Penalties
$2000/non-compliant package.
Efficiencies: Automated
surveillance. Alert to right person
– reduce false positives.
Roles: Business operations, Application
Support, IT support.
Better, faster decisions –
Has been deployed 2
months.
(Systar)
Technique: Uses rules with inference engine,
metric and dashboard objects.
Discovered some packages not
making it to flight.
E.g. if have one package noncompliant but have $2M revenue
on plane, take off or not?
Issues / Wish
list
Challenge: As
the business
process
changes, the
requirements on
BAM change.
Rolling out
dashboard with a
new process was
a challenge.
Remove silos – business
operations can see across
groups.
Delta Airlines
(Georgia Tech presenting)
5
Design for monitoring complex operational
information systems – with large event
volumes. Impact of system outages on
revenue.
Technique – XML is not efficient – use binary
or similar for internal and XML only as needed
for open consumption
Legacy systems
– need data
tapping to get
events from
legacy systems.
Event Processing Symposium
Summary– Common Elements
 Issue: Scope creep on BAM requirements
– When LOB views a dashboard, quickly see new possibilities/areas
– When process being monitored are designed concurrently
 Question discussed: is approach of using a standard event
format necessarily in conflict with requirement for being nonintrusive to systems being monitored?
 Issue: Out of order events, good programmer-free solution?
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Event Processing Symposium