| Is Your Business Reaching its Optimum Performance? | Brought to you by | 
| By Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, BSS Product Manager at Telecommunications Business Unit, COMARCH As your sales margins decrease, time becomes crucial. The performance management methodology is one of the most important tools enabling managers to make the right decisions at the right time. Considering the current communications market situation, it is important to measure all critical business figures and processes, and effectively link them to goals. Performance management is a set of activities ensuring that certain goals are met at all times and can be applied in numerous business areas, including personnel, processes, departments, projects, finance, general performance of the organization and more. Within network performance management, these activities include evaluation and reporting on telecommunications equipment, effectiveness of the network and services delivered. Performance management can also be used for budget and time control of large, complex projects. Other goals, such as sales growth, cost reduction and time-to-market can be monitored as well. The range of business process types in which performance is important is also extremely wide and can be related to order management, billing, invoicing, managed services, customer service, partner settlements and time-to-market for new services among others. The question is how can the activities connected with performance management of business-critical processes within a large organization be supported? The Past, the Future and the Present
Business Intelligence is based on historical and predictive information standpoints and is useful in analyzing large amounts of data, as well as in identifying the patterns and trends that affect the business. All this information can be combined to help managers with decision making. However, the business of most companies consists of running hundreds or thousands of shorter and longer, smaller and larger processes. These processes often go through multiple levels of the company hierarchy, various IT systems and numerous departments. The current process view and the possibility of detecting associated performance problems require an extension of Business Intelligence with real-time, event-driven data analysis, called Business Activity Monitoring. Information from Business Intelligence supplemented with a real-time view allows managers to make the most well-informed decisions at the right time. How Does It Work? 1. Definition of goals Depending on the organization type and the characteristics of the business, goals can vary. For service providers, goals can range from financial performance and market share indicators, to increasing customer satisfaction. One way the latter can be achieved is by shortening the average duration of the order management process. 2. Definition of measures ensuring goals are met Measures are represented by Key Performance Indicators (KPI) connected to particular processes, and can assess the duration of the business process, the number of orders processed within one hour, the number of errors in orders processed within a given time period, etc. To solve possible performance problems and to discover their source, we require measures linked to partial operations within processes. Therefore, it is necessary to have intermediate measures related to particular stages of the processes. 3. Definition of points for event collection In order to measure the intervals between particular stages of given business processes, we have to plug certain sensors into these processes. This means integrating the sensors with the Business Process Management system. Currently, an increasing number of solutions are using Service Oriented Architecture and modern Business Process Management systems, where such integration of sensors is not particularly complex. When the sensors are ready, they are able to produce events with appropriate values (e.g. time or volume), which can then be collected at the central point where they are processed 4. Perform Complex Event Processing to translate events into measures Complex event processing means processing events from multiple sources (sensors) and detecting complex event patterns, event correlations, timing and other operations. It is at this location that the information contained within multiple events is discovered. This information is then translated into the KPIs defined in step 2. 
Figure 1. Translating events into measures
5. Visualizing results in dashboards Dashboards depicting graphs, grids and alarms are commonly used. To visualize measures, it is important to have the option to build your own dashboards with current measures, history and other values.
If you are involved in monitoring order management processes, you may wish to view the average times for order registrations for each hour of a particular day. You may also want to know the location of the most important bottlenecks, as well as find out about the number of orders registered, separated by customer category. Each manager has different concerns and may be interested in more aggregated or more detailed information, including details about various business processes. Thus, visualization must be highly flexible and should allow the creation of custom dashboards for specific employees and managers. To be comprehensive, the information presented within the dashboards should consist of historical and forecasted data extracted from Business Intelligence and up-to-date measures. 6. Alarms and notifications In addition, in order to allow expedited responses to problems with KPIs or other issues detected, an automatic notification and alarm management functionality, or interaction with a trouble-ticketing system, should be possible. This can help quickly track and solve problems and improve overall performance. Detection of such situations is performed during Complex Event Processing basing on appropriate definitions. 
Figure 2. Comprehensive Performance Management for Business
Summary
Performance Management consists of multiple elements, from network performance management, to personnel, organizational or financial management. Monitoring business process performance should allow control of various domains including order management, billing, invoicing, managed services, customer service, partner settlements, time-to-market for new services and many more. The key is to attain a complete view of the historical and predictive data taken from the Business Intelligence and correlate it with real-time measures collected from multiple points within the business processes and various systems. However, it is most important to have the option to control this data in the context of KPIs, linked with high-level goals. Performance Management for Business is a crucial element for supporting decision-making, based on the essential information taken from the past, future and the present. In this manner, you can judge whether your business is heading in the right direction. |