The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence

Technically, decision process engineering employs BI, business process modeling, business rules, and workflow software.

That said, evidence suggests that companies are capitalizing on BI, business process engineering, and workflow to automate routine operational decisions, and thus we believe this concept will be extended to a much broader set of decision processes over the next decade. For example

In addition to aligning, optimizing, and measuring business performance at the strategic, tactical, and operational levels, we believe that there will be a technical alignment and optimization of the systems that are used to support this new business environment.

The above examples show the degree of structured, fact-based decision making that is possible for well-structured operational business processes.

a general proposition, the state of the art in business process management (BPM) is advancing to the point at which recurring multi-step business processes such as order processing, claims processing, campaign management, inventory management, materials management, and many other knowledge work processes are being standardized via the use of flexib

By use of the same concepts and technologies, companies can re-engineer decision processes that occur within the context of management processes, revenue-generating processes, and operating processes.

Rather, we see the strategic issue as a lack of top management recognition that business information and its exploitation by knowledge workers via relevant analytical techniques can be a core strategic competency that can make the difference between success and failure in the marketplace.

Online sales applications at sites such as Amazon.com use BI in the form of collaborative filtering of customers’ transaction patterns to identify additional books or compact discs a customer may wish to purchase and offer those items to the customer. This entails using workflow within a purchasing process that accesses BI before making a decision

An example is the Whirlpool case study: before their BI initiative, the manufacturing operation may have been producing their quotas of washers, not knowing that they were producing defective washing machines if they had purchased defective parts from suppliers. The management decision to use the “best suppliers” based on quality and price is now p