Business Activity Monitoring. Supporting business process optimisation

Read on to find out:

• What are the main features of Business Activity Monitoring?
• What can it do for your business?
• Who can benefit the most from a BAM tool?
• How does BAM drive process improvement?

Technical monitoring vs business process monitoring

When introducing advanced technologies, companies often focus on technical IT system monitoring and overlook the importance of business monitoring.

Tools like Grafana, Prometheus or Zabbix are commonly used to monitor infrastructure, server performance and app availability before any glitches affect business operations. However, limiting yourself to just one type of monitoring means you might lose sight of the bigger picture, including important aspects such as key process effectiveness. 

Business Activity Monitoring

To address the operational complexity typical of large institutions and its challenges, we have developed a tool that allows users to track and analyse business processes in real time.

Altkom’s Business Activity Monitoring is an advanced tool with which you can closely monitor all the technical aspects of your processes and optimise their business effectiveness. BAM allows you to track and analyse your business processes, monitor their effectiveness, identify bottlenecks and respond to any issues in real time. 

In addition, Business Activity Monitoring enables you to monitor user interactions, providing valuable insights into how customers interact with your company’s systems and products. This improves your ability to identify flashpoints and problem areas. 

Who is BAM for?

BAM is ideal for any institution that wants to continue improving its business operations and increase its competitive advantage, particularly companies in the financial sector, industry and telecommunications, which often rely on multiple parallel processes.

The tool enables data-driven decision-making, which makes it especially suitable for COOs, CFOs and CEOs who need to monitor multiple key performance indicators on a day-to-day basis. 

BAM will also support operational and production department managers in their management of day-to-day business processes.

Business Activity Monitoring: Main Features

Detecting bottlenecks with Heat Maps

One of the main features of BAM, known as Heat Maps, can be used to visualise business process effectiveness. Heat Maps allow you to monitor throughputs, processing time and the number of errors at any process stage. Thanks to such visualisations, operators are now able to identify hotspots at which processes slow down, indicating a possible bottleneck.

Advantages:

• Quick identification of problem areas in need of optimisation.
• Ability to quickly respond to potential problems and thus minimise downtimes and boost performance.
• Better service quality thanks to faster error response, translating into higher customer satisfaction and greater sales (e.g. in loan processes).

Data analysis and data presentation (diagrams)

BAM offers data visualisation tools that present information in a way that is more accessible and easy-to-understand for business users. This enables you to quickly identify the root of any problem and decide what steps need to be taken to improve process efficiency.

Advantages:

• Providing business teams with data for better informed decision-making.
• Achieving greater business flexibility by quickly adapting processes to changing business conditions.

Baselining and deviation monitoring

Baselining is a feature that calculates and presents mean values for selected process parameters, such as task duration or the number of errors. BAM uses such data to scan processes for any deviations from the norm and automatically alert you when it identifies irregularities. This key tool for continual process optimisation allows you to quickly detect and eliminate problems before they can affect your overall business efficiency.

Advantages:

• Quick detection of anomalies that could affect operational efficiency and profitability.
• Continual business process enhancement: monitoring business conditions and adapting processes accordingly.

AI-assisted anomaly prediction

BAM relies on AI modules to forecast potential anomalies in your business processes. The system is able to predict that a given task will take more time than usual and cause problems further down the road. This feature allows you to proactively manage risks and prevent issues before they can seriously affect your business performance.

Advantages:

• Increasing process availability thanks to early problem detection and response.
• Ensuring business continuity, crucially important for high service quality.

Report exportation and result analysis

BAM allows you to generate reports that can be easily exported to PDF files. These contain key process data, such as versions, names, task duration and detailed diagrams, and can be used during strategy and analysis meetings, allowing your teams to get a better idea of what measures may be needed for further process optimisation.

Advantages:

• Ability to share results and analyses with other departments that do not use BAM tools.
• Facilitating management decisions through accurate and easy-to-understand data.

Business monitoring applications: mortgage loans

Process: mortgage loan application processing

In any large bank, mortgage loan application processing will consist of multiple stages, such as preliminary application analysis, loan-carrying capacity assessment, document verification, loan decision and final agreement. Each of these stages is essential for fast and efficient customer service and operational effectiveness.

In this process, monitoring with the aid of Business Activity Monitoring software can deliver a major advantage.

Stage 1: Preliminary application analysis

At this stage, monitoring processes with BAM allows you to control how long it takes to complete the preliminary analysis of each application. The tool detects anomalies and alerts you when it takes much longer than average, which may indicate a bottleneck, caused by understaffing or problems with the document verification system.

Business process monitoring. BAM applications:

• Heat Maps show you which applications are processed fast and which are delayed, so you can identify process steps that require optimisation.
• Baselining monitors the average time needed for preliminary application analysis and alerts you if it is longer than usual, allowing you to take prompt measures.

Stage 2: Loan-carrying capacity assessment

During this stage, the BAM tool monitors the processing time and various error parameters, helping you to identify irregularities and performance drops along the process.

Business process monitoring. BAM applications:

• Anomaly prediction: BAM uses artificial intelligence to predict which applications are more likely to cause issues at this stage, e.g. because of incomplete data or a faulty capacity assessment algorithm. Early detection allows these anomalies to be fixed before they can affect the whole process.
• Reporting: based on monitoring data, BAM generates reports on processing time and any possible deviations from the norm. This enables you to analyse the effectiveness your capacity assessment teams in greater detail.

Stage 3: Final loan agreement

Using BAM at this final stage allows you to be sure you have collected all the necessary paperwork and avoid delays, which translates into improved customer satisfaction.

Business process monitoring. BAM applications:

• Heat Map: shows you where delays are the likely to occur, e.g. when preparing paperwork or sending it to the customer. Thanks to this feature, you can make quick tweaks to streamline the process.
• Process analytics: Monitoring tasks that lead up to a loan agreement allows you to detect any deviations from the norm and prevent problems that could delay the loan process.

Why use Business Activity Monitoring?

Even though Altkom Business Activity Monitoring cannot be used for business process automation on its own, it is still a powerful monitoring and optimisation tool.

Thanks to features such as heat maps, baselining, anomaly prediction and advanced data visualisation, companies can use it to quickly detect and eliminate bottlenecks, boosting their operational effectiveness. 

Using BAM is a way to improve your efficiency, but also your response to changing market conditions, which is crucial in today’s competitive business environment.