I recently wrote a white paper on intelligent business processes: making business processes smarter through the addition of visibility, automation and prediction. On Wednesday (October 30), I’ll be giving a webinar to discuss the concepts in more detail. You can sign up for the webinar here, which should cause a link of the replay to be sent to you even if you can’t make it to the webinar. Software AG sponsored the white paper and webinar (as well as another one coming up next month); you can download the white paper from Software AG directly or on CIO.com.
As with all of my vendor-sponsored white papers/webinars, these are my opinions in an educational/thought leadership format, not vendor promotional pieces.
Hi Sandy, just a question:
Have you personally seen these ‘intelligent processes’ work in a real world situation at a business? Can you please report what they have done with it, how they used it and what the measurable benefits were, especially in terms of the claimed agility, quality and prediction.
Regards, Max
Hi Max, thanks for your question. I have seen examples from a couple of vendors on how their customers are implementing intelligent processes. It’s important to realize that “intelligent processes” are not an out-of-the-box product or solution, but usually made up of a number of different components including process, rules, events, analytics, etc. I think that most of these are still pretty early: they’re providing intelligence (analytics and monitoring) on processes that include multiple systems so that it appears as a single end-to-end process, often in the absence of any sort of BPM system or other orchestration. Software AG’s customer Electrolux made a presentation at Gartner BPM earlier this year on their intelligent processes, which don’t use a BPMS but are more of a consolidated dashboard from multiple systems, but include predictive analytics based on order trends. They are seeing improvements in customer satisfaction because they’re able to manage orders and inventory more effectively.
SAP is also doing some interesting things with their “Operational Intelligence”, which provides a view into process from their ERP suite, their BPM product and other external systems, bringing it together into a consolidated dashboard with analytics on their HANA platform. I saw it last week at TechEd but haven’t had time to write up much about it; however, the session was recorded and you can watch it online.