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  1. Introduction to BPM
  2. Measuring business processes
  3. Metrics

Introduction


To determine which metrics to capture in the Process Data Warehouse, we follow a top-down approach

A   
B   

Following this approach enforces a discipline of making sure that your metrics  actually align with process goals and empower your decision makers to determine whether the process is meeting its goals.

After the metrics are defined, they can be implemented in the Process Designer  tool. There are two approaches to tracing the business data for Performance Data Warehouse:

  • Autotracking
  • Manual tracking

Based on the tracked data gathered through these two approaches, KPIs and SLAs can be defined for the business process.

Manual tracking

Autotracking

is a “sweeping” approach to capture business data in your processes. The alternative approach of manual tracking gives you more control  over which business data to track, and at which points in your processes to create more advanced custom reports. Using the manual tracking method, you combine tracking groups, tracking points, and timing intervals.

With tracking groups, you define which business data is related to each other, and then analyze that data using custom reports. The specific locations in your  BPDs where data needs to be captured are indicated with tracking points. A tracking point allows you to associate the specific business data with the  variables defined in the tracking group. The third concept, timing intervals, helps you analyze the amount of time elapsed between specific steps in your process.

Besides allowing you more control over capturing data, tracking groups provide you with the means to track data across multiple processes and process  applications. For processes within the same process app, create a tracking group and define the tracking points in as many BPDs as you want. If you want to capture data from multiple business processes across different process apps, create a tracking group in a toolkit, and then refer to that toolkit from each process app where you would like to use the tracking group

Key performance indicator

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a business metric related to the business process or an activity within the business process (such as wait time or resource cost). To track KPIs for your processes, autotracking must be enabled. Tracking data for KPIs allows you to analyze process performance in the Optimizer. It also supports SLAs.

The standard KPIs provided by IBM Business Process Manager are:

At process level   
At activity level   

A KPI can also be rolled up into a higher-level aggregate KPI. When creating a KPI, you can associate it with the aggregate KPI and specify a weight factor. This  situation is useful when creating SLAs. For example, the resource cost KPI and  labor cost KPI roll up into the cost KPI.

Custom KPIs can also be defined. Interesting data that would qualify as good  custom KPIs are business data that you want to include in an SLA.

Service level agreement

Service level agreement (SLA) is a part of a standardized service contract where, and and goes beyond the functionality provided by the SLA component within IBM Business Process Manager.