Several users with experience building such systems offered that advice at IDC's Business Intelligence and Business Process Forum here last week. All of the users said they have launched projects to infuse business processes with analytics to allow front-line workers to use exception handling to make decisions.
At Capital One Financial Corp., intelligent process automation or operational BI projects focus on high-level strategic areas such as cost cutting or outsourcing to ensure ROI, said David Hummelberg, managing vice president of IT at the McLean, Va.-based financial services firm.
In general, he said, "the value proposition [of a BI project] is pretty foggy going into it. That is why ours have been drafted behind a specific business issue."
Capital One uses intelligent process automation to route calls to 10,000 to 15,000 call center representatives, based on capacity and volume, Hummelberg said. As a result, the company has trimmed the operational costs of its mostly outsourced centers by 12 percent annually over the past several years while boosting customer satisfaction, he said.
The company has also placed a call center application on the desktops of workers in its outsourcers' facilities. It uses analytics to determine potential cross-selling opportunities based on the demographics and previous buying patterns of callers, he said.
Wayne Sipperly, manager of energy markets analysis at theNew York Power Authority, suggested that companies focus such BI projects in areas that can help meet corporate objectives and gain executive support.
The electricity supplier in White Plains, N.Y., has melded analytics and a rules engine with multiple transactional data sources to provide dashboards for its electricity traders, asset managers and executives, Sipperly said.
Since going into production in February 2005, the project has saved traders an hour per day each, yielding US$500,000 to $1 million in annual savings for the utility, he said. "You can't try to sell it for human resources [projects]," Sipperly advised. "You have to sell it where the dollars are."
The power authority's portal gives traders a dashboard with real-time information they can use to prepare 1,100 daily bids to buy electricity, he said. The traders base those bids on 26 sets of data from 11 sources.
Previously, "traders would end up with two screens and 20 windows open," Sipperly said. "There were no alerts, no trending capabilities. There was a heavy reliance on manual spreadsheets."
Using analytics capabilities, the dashboards help traders create optimal trading strategies. The dashboards can also alert users by e-mail in real time if bids fall below a certain threshold required for the company to meet financial performance or plant commitments, according to Sipperly.
A key challenge to implementing the portal system, Sipperly noted, was persuading users to give up spreadsheets for automated systems.
Efforts to meld BI with business processes must include significant input from business users in addition to generating substantial ROI, said Rick Broughton, director of IT strategy atDunkin' Brands Inc.in Canton, Mass.
Dunkin' Brands, which operates 12,000Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins stores, is replacing its manual system for collecting retail data with one that ties BI data to business processes. So far, 300 users have been trained on the new system, with another 200 to be trained, Broughton said.
As IT personnel create the system, business users are being tapped as data stewards because "they know what the best data is and the source for it," he said.
One of the biggest challenges can be keeping users focused on "practical business processes," said Steve Phillips, CIO atAvnet Inc.Although access to real-time information is often associated with these projects, such a capability isn't always necessary. In fact, Phillips said, if data "isn't needed in real time, it can cause unnecessary work."