Key Concepts |
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A set of concepts that you come across while working with the BAM application are explained here:
Business Event Response
Exceptional situations in business scenarios are common with some conditions, either imposing threat to business or provide opportunities. On such occasions, actions are required to handle the threats or take advantage of opportunities available. Business Event Responses come into picture on such occasions to warn or alert the users.
An insurance company can build reputation of being a customer-friendly firm while advertising a Service-level agreement (SLA) that any claim will be processed within a period of five working days. However, if the company fails to meet the advertised SLA even to a few customers then it is threat to company's reputation; and such 'threat' can be termed as a Business Event Response.
Business Measure
Business indicators are built to measure certain aspects of a business. Business Measures can be of type 'Graph' or 'KPI' (Key process indicators) and are exposed as Web services with internal implementation of query against the business data.
An insurance company can build a measure to know all the claims, which were approved last week.
Process Monitoring Object
A Process Monitoring Object is a set of associated attributes from a business process and related contextual application Web services, which need to be monitored as a logical group. Each Process Monitoring Object is persisted and can be used for the purpose of analysis by creating business measures on it.
A Process Monitoring Object is built in Process Platform business process context and non-process web services can be defined to invoke on process events.
An insurance company has multiple phases in its Claim handling process like 'Pre-processing', 'Review', 'Approval' and so on. In recent times, due to increased frauds in the industry for insurance claims, industry may start maintaining a database of people who are suspected with fraudulent claims. In a short interval, without changing its claim handling process, company would like to alert an investigation officer when a claim is done by these people. For such a case, companies can build a Process Monitoring Object called 'Claim_Investigation' which can have attributes from claim handling process like customer name, claim amount, SSN, claim date, claim ID and so on. Then there can be attributes from Web service called 'getFraudHistory(SSN)' which is not part of claim handling process. Customer can choose at which process event this web service need to be called in.
Key Performance Indicator
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) helps to monitor and capture critical information pertaining to Business Process or Activity. KPIs (Key Process Indicators) keeps track of any exceptions happening in an enterprise and trigger automatic actions to take immediate corrective actions. Actions such as send an email notification, invoke a new business process or call a Web service can be triggered, which enhances business operations through continuous process improvement.
An insurance company can define a KPI, to keep track of the number of claims approved in the last week, and can send a notification to the concerned authority if the number of claims approved in the last week is less than the minimum level.
Enterprise Data Object
The Enterprise Data Object (EDO) is the persistence object for data of the enterprise applications like SCM, CRM and so on. There is a possibility that enterprise would like to monitor these data objects, but they don't have any relation with any Process Platform business processes. Enterprises can reuse BAM infrastructure for monitoring by synchronizing these data objects to the BAM system and then build Business Measures on them.
Note: Dashboards and KPI monitoring services can be built on EDO but Business Event Responses cannot be built because they require Event support from enterprise applications, which is not supported by many applications. BAM supports EDOs, which are synchronized by using MDM component to same hub database where BAM hub is configured.
For a CRM system 'Customer_Details' may be a database table and when this table is synchronized to BAM Hub database via MDM synchronization component then this table can be considered as Enterprise Data Object in the BAM context.