BAM to give real-time enterprise insight

Johannesburg, 14 Jun 2004

Although business intelligence (BI) solutions aim to give enterprises the key information and perspective they need to make critical business decisions, their inbuilt latency often means that by the time the decision-makers see the information, it is too old to be of use, says Gartner.

A new technology, business activity monitoring (BAM), promises to eliminate this latency and give decision-makers 'instant insight`, which will buy them additional time in which to respond to critical business events.

Gartner defines BAM as follows: "BAM is an emerging business strategy, formed through the bringing-together of traditional BI and real-time technologies such as application integration."

According to Cynthia Cauley, SeeBeyond alliance manager for SA, the company`s newly launched eBAM Studio application is an enterprise module for rapidly designing and generating BAM applications to track relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) and manage critical business operations.

"It is necessary to make your business flexible enough to adapt quickly to changing conditions, whether they are regulatory- or business-oriented," says Cauley.

"BAM delivers a real-time view of business that can be used to improve productivity and operational effectiveness, and identify abnormalities and defects as soon as they occur."

As an example, she points out an incident in the UK pharmaceutical industry, which witnessed a spike in demand for hay fever medicine, but by the time the industry was aware that this was occurring and that it would need to increase supplies, there was a Bank Holiday weekend.

"This means that had they been aware of the spike in real-time, they could have made sure that the necessary re-supply occurred prior to the long weekend, which would have boosted their revenues. In other words, lack of real-time information meant a lost revenue opportunity.

"Another example is in the retail industry, where if BAM is used, a business can see in which areas stock is not moving as fast as it should and can arrange for spot reductions in price in those regions, in order to keep the stock moving off the shelves, giving the company greater control over its profit margins."

Cauley believes the financial, manufacturing and retail sectors will benefit the most from BAM technology.

"Because SA is especially strong in these sectors, we plan to focus our energies - through Bytes Business Solutions, our local reseller - on the SA market, although we will also look for opportunities within the remainder of Africa, through the various multinationals," she says.

"I think this year will see early adopters of BAM technology, and over the following two years will see a much larger uptake, as enterprises realise that it is ultimately all about leveraging your existing investment."