I hate being surprised. This morning, after pouring cereal into a bowl, I opened the refrigerator only to find that there was no milk. Boy that irritates me! So after leaving the house hungry and angry and driving into work, one of the most simple warning / alerts in the world today calmed me down.....I was getting low on gas and the red gas pump light came on. What a great thing! This simple alert provided me vital information of an upcoming problem. With that information in hand, I was able to make a decision on what action to take and when to take it.....before something terrible occurred that would leave me in the lurch.
I was additionally pleased by my own BPM product today in the same way. Around mid-morning, I started getting alerts that one of our own in-house Ultimus Adaptive BPM Software Suite processes that I oversee was trending late on a specific step. After inspecting the processes and seeing them replayed in front of my own eyes, I was given the opportunity to take a proactive approach on how I wanted to handle this situation. I could do nothing and hope for the best, or before the situation became critical, I could create a new business rule for the process to temporarily reassign the late tasks to another team member. This new process rule, which I defined to be in effect just for 6 hours (while my team member catches up on his other critical tasks) ensures my business process will continue to execute in the way I need it to.
After 4:36pm today, the rule will no longer be in effect (and the task workload assignments will be mandated again by the original process design). If I need to reenact this rule again, the rule will still be in my repository and I can simply choose to enable it. Crisis avoided! Next up....develop a business process that proactively buys milk from Lowe's Food and delivers it to my house.
Relevant Links:
Reduce Process Rework with Role Definition in Organizational Charts
Using Adaptive Discovery- A BPM Best Practice
BPM- A Sustainable Strategy for Your Company
Chris Adams
VP Product and Technology
Ultimus