1. Event Processing in Business Activity Monitoring (“BAM”)
Event Processing Symposium
March 15, 2006
Anthony Lopresti – Sales Engineer

2. The Business Problem Major International Shipping & Logistics Company
Post-9/11 Security Procedures for shipments into Canada
Each package airbill must be processed by Canadian Customs prior to aircraft departing from the US
Stiff fines per non-compliant package: $2,000
13 Flights to Canada per day
1000s of packages per flight

3. Airbill Management System Clearance Information Manager
High-level Process
Airbill Management System
Clearance Information Manager
Broker
Canadian Customs

4. Solution Business Process is monitored from 3 different angles
Business process execution
Data flow and application
Infrastructure
~300 different entities monitored (Flights, Applications, Data Flows, Queues/Topics, Databases, etc.)
750+ indicators being correlated, baselined, trended, forecasted and rolled-up into KPIs
Automatic correlation analysis is performed through sophisticated event-processing algorithm when positive/negative deviating KPIs from the norm are detected to find cause-effect and service-impact scenarios
Just as a review of the BAM concept

5. Unique Business Value
Ensuring Business Processes unfold as expected, according to business commitments and customer expectations
All flights leave on time
All packages are delivered on time  
Reducing the latency between when information is measured and decisions are made to seize business opportunities faster
Real-time analysis allows for “acceptable” fines (i.e. don’t hold up entire flight because of a couple of fines)
Pro-active monitoring of the end-to-end business process through early warnings
Big operational efficiency improvements:
Automated surveillance vs. manual before
Alert the right person at the right time vs. mass alerts in a hurry where only a couple of people out of 20 are concern by the event
Reduced Mean-Time-To-Repair
Identification of recurring “fracture-points” leading to process improvement
Better inter-departmental communication
Just as a review of the BAM concept

6. Event Processing Techniques
Impact Analysis
Evaluating the impact of a problem on the progress of the business activity or key performance indicator
Business context Analysis
Evaluate abnormal activity in context
Evaluate business performance by product and regions
Root-Cause Analysis
Determining the cause of the problem: business for Operations; technical for the Application Support Group
Risk Analysis and Predictability
When problems arise, evaluating the remaining maneuvering room to reach operational objectives
Baseline
Determining “normal” behavior and comparing real behavior with the baselined norm.

7. Event-driven architecture
The BusinessBridge architecture enables business events to traverse the whole product stack in real time. The nature of most BAM dashboards requires instant correlation of newly occurring business or technical events within the current context of BAM objects. This is done in BusinessBridge by a unique, embedded real time correlation engine.
Rules are pre-compiled by the BusinessBridge Correlation Engine compiler, with internal in-memory data handling and premise parsing & splitting for optimization.
Smart rule evaluation scheme: Due to specific, in memory, maintenance of pointer-chained memory objects (and not tables) to link permanently incoming events with objects and rules premises, rules are evaluated only when necessary, leading to drastic acceleration in correlation performance.

8. A powerful event-driven inference engine

9. Commercial Software Components
Systar BusinessBridgeTM receiving data from:
HP OpenView
Oracle
Sybase
WMI
Tibco/JMS
WebsphereMQ
OmegaMon

10. Challenges Business Process being monitored was new
Business Process was constantly changing during implementation
Deadline imposed by regulation