Business process and workflow management in business intelligence

¶ … Business Intelligence

The greater the level of uncertainty and risk within a given economic period, the more critical analytics and business intelligence (BI) become to any business. From the Fortune 1,000 companies who are orchestrating the development of new products across several nations and R&D centers to the small business attempting to win new customers by analyzing unmet needs, all are unified by the need for BI tools and platforms.

Analytics and BI have commonly been used throughout organizations to support and supplement marketing, selling and customer service strategies with greater insight. Their use in operations and manufacturing planning and execution, including integration to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, continues to gain greater use as BI tools can now be used in conjunction with lean manufacturing and Six Sigma quality initiatives (Subramoniam, Tounsi, Krishnankutty, 2009). This however is a recent development and one that has led researchers in the field of analytics and BI integration to ERP and fulfillment systems to label with the term process intelligence (Bosilj-Vuksic, Indihar-Stemberger, Kovacic, 2008). This nascent area is one that seeks to capture quantitative information on the performance of a given series of complex processes and create more effective workflows using Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) techniques (Subramoniam, Tounsi, Krishnankutty, 2009). The origination point of process intelligence can be tied to the optimization of workflow management systems and the use of Business Process Management (BPM) and BPR techniques in conjunction with PERT-based optimization logic and operations management techniques (Fakas, Karakostas,1999). The use of advanced forms of analytics and BI to streamline business process and workflow management continues to be a nascent area. The use of role-based analytics within legacy ERP systems is a strategy Infor, Oracle and SAP are using to differentiate their previous-generated systems. Infor is leading in the development of role-based analytics for legacy ERP systems as a means to upsell their large customer base. This development of role-based analytics on the ERP side is being matched only by a few studies of how effective this integration is from a long-term strategy standpoint (Subramoniam, Tounsi, Krishnankutty, 2009). The value of workflows, BPM and BPR from a productivity standpoint are well proven (Fakas, Karakostas,1999). The integration of analytics and BI into process workflows is nascent and emerging however, with the catalyst of role-based analytics in ERP systems being a market driver in conjunction with risk reduction (Bosilj-Vuksic, Indihar-Stemberger, Kovacic, 2008). The value of analytics and BI in more complex workflows and process management has much potential, yet has been constrained to this point based on user adoption and systems integration technologies.