FileNet Debuts Business Activity Monitoring System

FileNet Corp. today today launched its FileNet Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) system, which provides event management and real-time visibility of business performance data to enhance operational responsiveness and decision making.

Based on FileNet’s P8 Enterprise platform, the new BAM software runs in conjunction with FileNet’s business process management BPM system and provides visibility into the effectiveness of business processes and overall organizational performance as measured against key performance indicators (KPIs).

Using the BAM system, managers can receive alerts via customizable dashboards and automatically initiate action or workflows based on those alerts. Business managers can also analyze data and correlate it with business processes, as well as data from other enterprise applications to gain further insight into specific alerts and events.

"The value of an organization is how well it executes business processes," said Chris Preston, FileNet's vice-president of PPM Products and Markets. "BAM is more than dashboards. It allows you to throttle the performance of an organization and identify issues before they become problems. You can track data in real time and correlate the data to identify problems and take immediate action to reduce risk."

FileNet’s BAM system lets users configure their own dashboards to track specific metrics and alerts that are relevant to their job function. Users can modify KPIs, metrics, and alerts in response to changing market requirements. It includes an integrated rules engine to help organizations discern whether action should be taken on an out-of-range dashboard reading.

The system employs a streaming database, as opposed to batch processing, to eliminate data latency, ensuring real-time reporting and event handling.

The BAM capabilities are meant to work in conjunction with business intelligence systems, according to Preston. "Business intelligence (BI) is tuned to analyze historical data, not track business events in real time," he said. "BAM is focused on reatime event tracking and doesn't retain data for an extended period of time."

For compliance applications, the BAM system can be configured to track compliance indicators, such as potential fraud events," Preston added. "Compliance applications also have to prove how and why a decision was made, and the BAM solution incorporates process flow as records," he said.

FileNet BAM will begin shipping in December with prices starting at $115,000, which includes an application server and a 10-user license.