Processes in organizations sometimes break, often with little consequence. However, at times a broken process can (more…) lead to a catastrophe. A Complex Event Processing engine allows organizations to look out for these risky events and provide meaningful alerts. Come see Intricity's video on Complex Event Processing and see if it might be a good fit for your organization.
Text from the Video:
Every once in a while something happens that breaks a process, whether that “something” is a person or an event. Most of the time, these events is a simple mistakes or glitches. However, sometimes certain events can spell a PR catastrophe and/or lead in huge losses for a corporation.
But, in the world of Business Intelligence we seem to always be looking at what happened after the event has occurred, wishing we had caught the problem in process.
Let me provide an example.
Imagine you have an existing customer that is looking at expanding their relationship with you, by tripling their order of widgets. Your sales rep is elated and He begins forecasting this large deal for the end of the quarter. The deal is moving along nicely and the decision process has been identified to closure, with your customer’s executives in agreement.
Unbeknownst to this sales rep, your customer calls your company’s support line because their current widgets are having a problem. The support team is not aware of the expansion opportunity, and treats the support ticket like any other. Your customer gets bounced around your call center, and the ticket goes unresolved.
The issue raises doubts in your customers mind about the purchase of more widgets, and the end of the quarter is fast approaching. The sales rep learns near the end of the quarter about this problem and He escalates the support request. The issue is fixed, but not in time to close the business by the end of the quarter. Your customer is left feeling like they won’t be supported unless they have a pending purchase.
Think about how the CEO of this fictitious company would come to know about this problem? He would receive a report of last quarter’s sales and would want to know why they missed their forecast. Any explanation would be after the fact, of course.
So effective information delivery is not just about what happened in the past, but it’s also about alerting you of the present. And this is where Complex Event Processing steps into the picture. You can think of Complex Event Processing or CEP as an alerting hub. This means it is connected to the various sources of data in your organization, with a series of prebuilt triggers for certain events. When the triggers are set off, a prebuilt warning can be sent to either a human or another machine.
You can imagine how the use of this tool would have helped the sales rep quickly escalate the support issue so that it didn’t get in the way of His opportunity.
Now it’s important to understand that there is no pixie dust here. In order for a CEP tool to work effectively, the triggers need to be built or defined, then we need to identify who gets notified, and what criticality rating to give each notification. Like any other BI project, this means that the Business will need to be highly engaged in the process. Some CEP tools allow the business to modify the trigger parameters, and some provide a business friendly interface for designing the triggers themselves. The beauty of leveraging a CEP tool is in monitoring correlated events that set off targeted triggers to the business.
The use of a CEP tool can transform how a business reacts to daily events. At Intricity we focus on bringing value to your data assets no matter where that data is in its lifecycle. I recommend you reach out to Intricity, and talk with one of our specialists. We can help you tackle some of your most egregious and expensive processes, and bring real value to the bottom line.
