Towards EDI-Based Business Activity Monitoring

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) systems aggregate and analyze data from operational systems in order to provide real-time information about activities and events in organizations. Events and business data used in BAM systems frequently originate from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Such ERP systems generally store and process information only according to predefined process/event models that are specifically tailored to individual organizations. Moreover, ERP systems may not model inter-organizational business processes accurately. Consequently, BAM based on such systems is limited in its scope to information that has been anticipated at design time of these systems. "Unexpected" information, such as incoming Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) messages that are not "understood" by the employed ERP implementation, is generally ignored. In other words, potential business intelligence is lost unless the ERP system in place gets adapted to handle the until-then ignored information. However, such adaptations are costly and potentially time-consuming. In this paper, we introduce our vision of using observed EDI messages directly as a data source for events and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to be used for BAM, thereby "bypassing" the typically intercalated ERP systems. This may provide organizations with additional flexibility for monitoring activities and events which are not (yet) modeled in their ERP systems. Additionally, it may help integrating inter-organizational business processes into BAM.