Building Business Measures

This topic describes the process of Business Measure creation using the Business Measure Editor.

A Business Measure is a measurement of an aspect of a process that is used to assess business performance. The Business Measures are calculated across multiple runs of the process clubbed with business data to find the Average, Maximum, Minimum, or Total number of occurrences.

A Business Measure can be used to define the calculation for a Graph or Key Performance Indicator (KPI), which measures performance against a business objective. The value of the Business Measure can be captured and visualized through Dashboard also.

Apart from processes there is a possibility that an enterprise would like to monitor data objects, which do not have any relation with any Process Platform business processes. Enterprises can reuse BAM infrastructure for monitoring by synchronizing these data objects to BAM system and then build Business Measures on them.

The Enterprise Data Object (EDO) is the persistence object for data of the enterprise applications like Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and so on.

Note: Dashboards (consuming the Business Measures created on EDO) and KPI can be built on EDO but the Business Events cannot be built because it requires Event support from the enterprise applications, which is not supported by many applications. BAM supports EDO which is synchronized using Cordys MDM component to same hub database where BAM hub is configured.
A Web service can also be registered as a Business Measure where in Web services are consumed in the Business Measures and these Business Measures are used to visualize the required data in an output format using custom dashboard in BAM. The Web services can be used to define complex queries such as making a compound measure using two Business Measures. The same can also be used in KPI Editor for closed loop monitoring.
The Business Measure Editor facilitates the creation of Business Measures and thereby helps monitoring the performance of a Business Process, its activities and also an Enterprise Data Object. The high level tasks that you can perform using Process Platform Business Measure editor are:

1. Creating a Business Measure
2. Publishing a Business Measure
3. Unpublishing a Business Measure
4. Editing a Business Measure
5. Deleting a Business Measure
   
   Example: You can define a Business Measure called Average Shipping duration for a high valued customer 'John' through Business Measure Editor by making use of aggregate function 'Average' and using attribute 'Lead time for Shipping' in select clause and using customer name 'John' in the where clause of the query. This could be used, in turn, to create a KPI called 'Average Shipping Duration < 5 days' and can also be viewed on a dashboard, displaying the value of the monitored item as a trend; alternatively it (Business Measure) can be directly consumed in the Dashboard to display the value of the monitored item.