Organisation Processes Monitoring: Business Intelligence Systems Role

Organisation Processes Monitoring: Business Intelligence Systems Role

C. Rossignoli1 and A. Ferrari2

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to analyze if Business Intelligence Systems (BISs) can facilitate the monitoring of the uncertainty inherent in the organisation processes and consequently contribute to achieve its performance objectives.

Introduction

Organisations are open social systems that face uncertainty when making decisions [1] regarding company processes. Facing this uncertainty it must facilitate the collection, gathering and processing information about all organisational variables [2] BISs concern technologies supporting the Business Intelligence (BI) process, an analytical process which allows to gather and transform data into information [3–5]. Company processes are studied in the literature as a group of information processing activities. An approach of this kind, adopted for the purpose of this paper, is the Information Processing View (IPV), according to which organisations may reach a desired level of performance if they are able to process information to reduce the uncertainty characterizing their processes [6, 7]. The research method adopted in this paper is the study of a selected case, i.e., an international company in the pharmaceutical sector. It concerns the implementation of a Business Intelligence System (BIS) to monitor the overall production activities of the plant in order to guarantee the efficiency of the manufacturing process so as to improve performance. Based on the initial results of the analysis, BISs really contribute to an enhanced control the manufacturing process, and consequently improve the management of uncertainties generated by incomplete information flows and occurrence of random events. Prompt monitoring of uncertain conditions allows to take the corrective actions that contribute to achieve the desired level of performance.

1 Universita 2 Universit` a

di Verona, Verona, Italy,...