This is quickly becoming the new mantra here at Global 360. I’m not sure where it originated exactly, but some of our sales guys in London are taking credit for it. It’s a simple statement that seems like common sense. How can one possibly manage something well if one can’t make the right kind of measurements against it at different times and compare performance? I’m sure it is this exact sentiment that causes many companies to rush to fill their portals with executive balanced score cards and dashboards with traffic lights and gauges. And come on who doesn’t like gauges? High-level managers and executives want to look at a simple dashboard and instantly know how all the different aspects of the business they are responsible for are doing. And they want to know this in as close to real time as possible. In an ideal world, if something important that I am responsible for even starts to look like it may be going off track, I should be proactively alerted via email or text message or whatever channel of my choosing. Companies are, in general, starting to get the importance of measuring the different aspects of their business. BI vendors have been making out pretty well in recent years because of this.

Many business processes require a special kind of business intelligence applied to it for it to be really meaningful. We at Global 360 call this BI that is specialized for process “Process Intelligence”, and we have a product called Insight360 that is ideally suited for it. It has two components to it that are both crucial to this whole measurement concept, simulation and analytics. The simulator allows one to model a high level business process made up of both human and system activities. One can setup participants who can work varying roles, be assigned costs, and even be assigned performance factors such as Mary works 30% faster than Bill. One can set up arrival patterns that describe how work enters the process, and these are so configurable that for example one can assign any one of about fifteen kinds of statistical distributions to it.

Bruce Silver, an independent analyst who focuses on BPM, wrote a pretty interesting post about simulators back in March of this year called Is Simulation Fake? .

It’s a fair question. There are so many parameters and variables in a typical business process that it is hard to conceive of being able to represent the entire process in a model that takes it all into consideration properly. The newest release of Insight360 has almost all the features (and I feel all the important ones) that Bruce says are needed to keep a simulator from being fake. There is one concept it is missing that he speaks of that I had never even heard of before. This is the first scenario he talks about regarding predictive performance analysis in which he suggests one ought to be able to measure the process improvement at the model level. In other words, there should be some empirical process efficiency rating for a process or at least a way to measure one against the other that factors in how many activity hand-offs there are, points of failure, built-in time or resource constraints, etc. There ought to be some efficiency measurement you can know without having to run the scenarios with varying resources to see the improvements. Cool idea. We don’t have that yet though.

 Regardless, Insight360 lets you accurately model your real world scenarios with all the parameters and configurations that generally matter for human-centric processes. You can then perform ‘what if’ scenarios such as what happens if I increase the number of people doing my health claims, or what if we started getting 50% more volume than normal.

All the simulation data (how long each process and activity took, how long it was in a waiting state, how much were the workers utilized, etc) gets structured into an OLAP cube that one can slice, dice, and visualize in the tool of one’s choice (We’re finding Excel 2007 is amazing at this and what’s really cool is one can easily post the excel charts in your SharePoint portal). This allows one to know the impact of a business change before it happens.

Some of our customers are starting to use this tool as a means to calculate the ROI of a process improvement project before they do it. They hold a Lean Six Sigma kaizen session to lean the process of its waste which results in an ‘As-Is’ state model and a ‘To-Be’ state model. Running the scenarios with expected work arrival volumes and time frames and resources shows the expected benefits and costs.

We often recommend using Insight360 before you implement any BPM project. You think you need to automate that process? How do you know your time is better spent fixing that process versus a different one? Exactly how much do you expect to gain by automating that portion of that process? How do you know if you haven’t first measured in some reliable way. And this is why we say, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure!”