Business Activity Monitoring or BPM using QlikView?

[#1]

The term 'Business Activity Monitoring' was originally coined by analysts Gartner, Inc and refers to the aggregation, analysis, and presentation of real time information about activities inside organizations and involving customers and partners. A Business Activity can either be a business process that is orchestrated by Business Process Management (BPM) software, or a business process that is a series of activities spanning multiple systems and applications. BAM is an enterprise solution primarily intended to provide a real-time summary of business activities to operations managers and upper management.

Although BAM systems usually use a computer dashboard display to present data, BAM is distinct from the dashboards used by Business Intelligence (BI) in so far as events are processed in real-time or near real-time and pushed to the dashboard in BAM systems, whereas BI dashboards refresh at predetermined intervals by polling or querying databases. Depending on the refresh interval selected, BAM and BI dashboards can be similar or vary widely.

It seems to me that a simple macro or cron file could be developed to run the BI processes and push to a BAM dashboard. Am I making BAM too simple or is there more to BAM than I imagine?

[#2]

Hi Brecken2,

Thanks for the clarification on BAM. As far as I know you should be able to retrieve data on the fly as you reload your scripts either by using the timing interval in the QlikView server or by a button with a macro behind it which can be triggered by the user.

What are you trying to achieve?

[#3]

Hypothetically, when ever you have a high volume supply chain that relies on many components, deviation, even slightly can cause disruption in many different manufacturing processes. A container supplier to a soft drink or beer manufacturer needs to deliver a truck load of bottles every 13.5 minutes. It takes 10 minutes to unload the truck and another 3.5 minutes to move the fork lift to the next truck with the assignment of locations in a warehouse. A printing company, printing brochures needs to have dozens of printers working at their capacity to generate the pages for a collator and packaging equipment. The analysis of these processes using BI can only show a point in time so the average must be X, but if X varies, the whole process slows down. BAM runs the query every 2, 3, ....50...100 seconds to look for variances. It is those variances BAM looks at. The variance is the issue in business process management. The button option with a macro behind it won't do it. A cron file that runs the same query for a 24 X 7 period will work. The button option is the traffic cop with a radar gun. The speedometer that records the speed is what I am looking for.

[johnw]

I can't provide details because I haven't played with it yet, but QlikView version 9 allows you to push data to the dashboard rather than pulling data from the source at regular intervals. In theory, I would think that would give you your spedometer rather than your radar gun. Someone else will need to provide the details, though.

[#5]

Just like John I have no experience with the pushing of the data and hope that someone else will jump in.

For the analysis there is a statistical wizard that currently allows you to test the data from samples (Chi-square / T - test ) but it looks to me that you require the ANOVA test to monitor the variances in your examples near real time. I haven't yet encountered these kinds of functionality yet (probably because I haven't need them) but I am not sure whether these are incorporated in QlikView or not.

I am sorry not to be much of a help after all, but I also would like to know the analysis of the variances can be done with QlikView 9 or not?