Industries

 
   

 

 
     
 
 
 

Business Monitoring and Control

 
 

 

 
 

Business Monitoring and Control (BMC) is concerned with efficient and effective use of financial, physical, and human recourses. This also involves understanding the trends/patterns throughout the organization. The specific functions performed by BMC systems are:

  • Monitor and control financial resources to make sure that the company is financially strong and stable. This is typically accomplished through financial audits and controls and involves regulations such as the Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) Act.

  • Monitor and control IT assets to make sure that no privacy and integrity violations occur. This involves the broad area of IT security audits and controls.

  • Physical asset monitoring and control to assure that buildings, materials, office supplies, and other physical assets owned by the organization are not vulnerable. This involves building security and physical asset controls.

  • Monitor and control human recourses to make sure that people are doing jobs that need to be done. This is typically accomplished through lower level management in coordination with human resources department.

  • To be effective, a BMC system must have access to information about several areas, detect events that need attention, and understand past events and be able to develop trends and patterns.

BMC has been a manual effort for several years, especially in small to medium businesses. However, many automated BMC systems have been developed and will continue to be developed in the future. Examples of the automated BMC systems are the Cognos Controller, management cockpits, financial control systems, etc.

Real-Time Business Activity Monitoring (RBAM) and Real-time Enterprises. Many corporations such as GE and Intel are adopting the real-time enterprise model in which the real-time status of business activities critical to the company's day-to-day operations is displayed and acted upon. In the case of GE, a large screen displays an array of green, yellow, and red icons that represent the status of GE's business activities. This allows the managers to monitor and control business activities in real-time.