Tying Business Intelligence with Business Process Management

Companies are watching carefully, using business intelligence and analytics tools to figure out what’s happening in their markets from the perspective where efficiency can make the difference between profit and loss. The goal is to use right analytics tools to guide business processes changes towards “dramatic productivity enhancing”. This is a responsibility of CIO to establish cooperation between IT department and business units to create a data warehouse and to enable the best use of predictive analytics tools and techniques and tying them with BPM. The metrics are: improvement of financial forecasting, customers retaining and operating profits.


Examples of successful data enabling changes where analytics and BPM are connected:

· The insurance industry – fraud detection;
· Order management, global inventory and invoicing;
· Increasing timing intervals of reports for the decision making produced results allowing adjust business process;
· Analytics tools integrated with customer-relationship management (CRM) or e-commerce systems helps improving processes for engagement with customers;
· Introducing measurements and showing success from the analytics-BPM helps CIO to add more dedicated to analytics staff to their teams.

Companies discover new ways to save:

· Business analytics produced incredible results for CUNA Mutual to open their eyes where that should concentrate their effort to attract new customers. Example: to attract generation Y – build mobile and web products; provide up-sale additional services in convenient way.
· Outsourcing of analytics and data warehousing by using the 3rd party vendor (like Oco) thorough their SaaS tools can resolve a lot of timing issues and save money by providing timely reports and provides for for necessary changes in the business processes. Example: transportation expenses were cut by 12-15%.

Organizations can improve their conversation with customers:

· Many modern BI and analytics tools provide prebuild statistical models which remove the need for highly educated resources and reduce time of the analyses. Example: complex analyses as segmenting customers based not simply on demographics and the products and services they buy, but also on less cut-and-dried information, such as how they behave at a website or what comments they make during call- center interactions .
· Key to game-changing decision making is the ability to detect and respond to market changes, taking into account historical knowledge. Evaluating historical data such as the average annual revenue the customer represents, her payment history and other bought product, and forming the customer value, Direct TV created tactics how to cut churn rates and retain customers.
· Coca Cola created an innovative personalized way of attracting their consumers to interact through the website and provide information about where the products were purchased and offer customers some rewards for that. The company uses this feedback to tailor its pitches and have a relevant dialog with customers.  The company has learned that watching behavior is more meaningful than reading questionnaires Web visitors are asked to fill out. The idea is not just to save business but to create new business.

Analytics tools help companies create more money-generating interactions with customers and shave costs from internal operations. CIOs should connect analytics technologies with ideas about refining business processes.


Resources:  Kim S. Nash, CIO. June 17, 2010. Business Intelligence Meets BPM: Using Data to Change Business Processes on the Fly. Retrieved from www.cio.com