Lean, flexible, and efficient processes are the foundation of every successful business. Whether you are a service provider or a manufacturer, a mid-sized company or a large corporation, and whether you work in production, accounting, sales, or service: the digitalization and automation of processes has arrived in organizations of every industry and size.
But transforming analog processes into digital ones is not enough on its own. Across many of our customer projects, we see that companies need to continuously monitor and analyze their business processes to unlock the full potential of digitalization — this is where process monitoring comes in. The way work is organized has a decisive impact on the quality of services and on how economically those services are delivered. Modern technologies help organizations simplify and accelerate the path toward optimal operational workflows and keep process performance consistently high.
This guide explains, in depth, why you should monitor and analyze your business processes with X4:
- Overview & benefits: With the X4 Control Center, X4 BPMS provides a powerful dashboard for Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) that delivers real-time data on process availability, processing states, and runtimes. This gives business users and administrators a comprehensive view of their processes at any time.
- Functions & control options: The system comprises several modules — the Process Monitor for real-time monitoring and KPI analysis, the Process Scheduler for time-controlled execution, the Parameter Editor for adjusting runtime settings, and the Web App Configuration for custom user interfaces. All of these modules can be operated in the browser, with no programming knowledge required.
- Advantages for your organization: Centrally visualizing technical and business process metrics makes it possible to increase efficiency, improve quality, and reduce costs. Early error detection, faster response to disruptions, and optimized use of resources support well-founded decisions — powered by real-time dashboards and flexible reports.
The Challenges: Why Do You Need Process Monitoring?
To stay competitive, gain an edge, or extend an existing lead, you need to make progress across different areas of your organization. You have to:
- improve speed (e.g., shorter cycle times)
- increase adaptability (e.g., new products or services)
- boost cost-effectiveness (e.g., more efficient use of resources)
The prerequisite is that you master your processes. In the ideal state, all processes are captured, analyzed, and modeled, process standards are defined and documented, and processes are steered effectively and efficiently — and automated as far as possible through Business Process Management. Internal workflows run largely error-free, quickly, and cost-effectively. Roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and transparent, all information is easy to find, and customer satisfaction is high.
The major challenge: organizations operate in a VUCA world shaped by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. From the globalization of competition and technological leaps to regulatory change, the pace of change keeps accelerating — and it directly affects the process landscape. Processes take on a life of their own, and it becomes ever harder to stay on top of them, make good decisions, and act preventively and proactively.
This is where the systematic monitoring and analysis of processes comes into play.
The Goals of Process Monitoring
- Identify problems and risks early and determine their root causes
- Eliminate problems before they have a negative impact on the business
- Identify and leverage efficiency potential
- Learn continuously and strengthen process performance through growing expertise
Reasons for Introducing Process Monitoring: Examples
- Compliance needs to be improved, e.g., through ISO certification
- Legal requirements must be met, e.g., IT security or energy-industry regulations
- Management wants KPI reports for business process optimization and active risk management
- The IT department needs detailed metrics for IT escalation management
In the following section, we take a detailed look at the benefits for the different areas of your organization.
Your Benefits: How Does Monitoring Your Business Processes Pay Off?
Process monitoring — or Business Activity Monitoring — does more than make processes visible and standardized beyond the modeling stage. It provides important indicators of process health, bottlenecks, and disruptions, tailored to the needs of the respective users or departments. Because process management cannot simply be “completed” once a Business Process Management (BPM) initiative is in place: it requires continuous monitoring and analysis of running processes, along with sensible follow-up actions to counter problems and keep optimizing.
The 5 Biggest Benefits of Process Monitoring
1. Transparency and Benchmarking
- A real-time view of status and process progress
- Continuous performance checks: target-vs.-actual comparison from an internal perspective, as well as against competitors (industry indices, association benchmarks, and so on)
- Prioritization of measures on the processes that create the most value
2. Higher Process Quality
- An overview of the error rate within a process
- Identification of the most frequent errors or bottlenecks
- Minimization of friction losses at department boundaries
3. Cost Reduction
- Detailed insight into process costs
- Analysis of processes or sub-steps with high resource consumption (time, materials, manpower)
4. Greater Flexibility
- Faster response to problems
- Proactive action through self-learning systems
- Quicker adaptation to changing market and customer requirements
5. Security and Risk Reduction
- Precise process documentation for compliance requirements, audits, and certifications
- Valid KPI dashboards and management reports at the push of a button
- Up-to-date metrics for internal control systems and escalation management
Because the modern monitoring and analysis of business processes is data-driven and software-supported, responsibility for process monitoring often sits with IT. But process monitoring is not limited to IT processes: it is a holistic, integrative approach that represents, manages, automates, monitors, and analyzes all business-critical workflows with IT support — for every type of process in every department. Think of ordering processes in procurement, invoicing workflows in accounting, production processes in manufacturing, recruiting workflows in HR, checkout processes in an online shop, or lead management in sales.
Key Terms Around Process Monitoring
Business Process
A sequence of individual activities carried out step by step to achieve a business or operational goal. Business processes are commonly divided into core processes, supporting processes, and management processes.
Business Process Management (BPM)
An approach to identifying, modeling, executing, monitoring, and continuously improving an organization’s business processes in a goal-oriented way. It examines not only technical aspects but also organizational and strategic questions. Professional software is frequently used to digitalize and automate BPM tasks.
Business Process Monitoring
A sub-discipline of BPM concerned with automatically monitoring the execution of modeled processes and detecting potential deviations.
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
The real-time capture of critical performance indicators with the goal of improving the speed and effectiveness of business functions — usually in combination with BI tools. Often used as a synonym for business process monitoring.
Technical System Monitoring
The monitoring of technical operations and active alerting in the event of disruptions, based on technical parameters such as load times, utilization, storage capacity, or availability.
Business Monitoring
Business monitoring extends technical system monitoring by relating technical data to its business context (e.g., user behavior). The goal is to detect stoppages or delays in processing — for example, to reinforce case-handling teams in time when too many items are waiting in the inbox.
Process Mining
Whether an ERP or CRM system: most business processes are supported by IT systems that collect vast amounts of data about how processes actually run. Process mining uses these digital footprints for process analyses that go beyond target-vs.-actual comparisons — identifying problems and, with the help of algorithms, also answering the “why,” thereby deepening process knowledge.
Business Process Metric
A concrete measured value used to steer a process. For effective monitoring, it is essential to select the right metrics for each process goal (time, quantity, value, or quality).
Check Parameter
A synonym for process metric.
How Do You Find “Good” Process Metrics?
Process metrics are linked to your business goals and act as check and evaluation parameters for process performance. The success of your process monitoring therefore stands or falls with the specific metrics you choose. To reconstruct process performance automatically from data that already exists, more and more companies turn to process mining. But which parameters should you monitor? And at what point — and where along the process chain — should measurements be taken?
The sheer number of possible metric combinations can make it hard to see the forest for the trees. A “good” metric delivers a steering signal from which you can draw conclusions and derive actions. When metrics are consolidated and tied to concrete process goals and target values, they become KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that make deviations from the target visible and thereby point to weaknesses and room for improvement. Process KPIs are frequently visualized in dashboards or cockpits.
Examples of commonly used process metrics
Outcome Metrics: Measuring Effectiveness and Efficiency
Effectiveness metrics show whether a process met the expectations placed on it. Efficiency metrics assess how economically processes run.
- Customer satisfaction
- Error rate
- Complaint rate
- Production cost per unit
- Machine cost per unit
- Labor cost per unit
Disruption Metrics: Managing Uncertainty
Metrics that stem from unwanted influences you cannot control — you can only limit their negative impact on the process.
- Employee sick days
- Machine downtime
- Weather and seasonal effects
Control Metrics: Steering Processes
Metrics that can be directly influenced by the process owner.
- Employee qualification
- Machine capability (e.g., processing speed)
- Turnover rate
Supplier Metrics: Assessing Supplier Input
- On-time delivery
- Delivery-quantity accuracy
- Raw-material complaint rate
A central criterion for good metrics is measurability. If you want to measure customer satisfaction, for example, you need a comparable and quantifiable system, such as a traffic-light or five-star rating.
Prerequisites for Monitoring Business Processes
The raw material for automated, IT-supported process monitoring is data from digitalized processes: the more processes you have already mapped digitally, and the more data you collect about them, the more detailed your analyses can be — and the better you can derive measures for process optimization from the results.
The data for process monitoring can come from IT systems already in use across your organization, such as an ERP system, CRM software, or a workflow or ticketing system — in principle, any software that logs process activity. With process mining, you gain insight into how processes actually run — the as-is state. When this data is clustered, related to the to-be states modeled in Business Process Management, and combined with BI tools, raw data turns into meaningful information about weaknesses and optimization potential.
When setting up process monitoring, consider which process participants need which information: management works with different metrics than IT, customer support, or logistics. Every process can be analyzed across a wide range of attributes. Which parameters you monitor and analyze depends on the perspective of the process owner. Regardless of the process monitoring tool you use, the first step is therefore to untangle the “jungle of metrics” and define the right metrics — the ones with the greatest sensitivity to the process outcome.
A metric profile can help with systematic monitoring:
- Unit of measurement
- Process goal and concrete target value
- Intervention limits
- Collection frequency
- Collection method
- Process owner responsible for the metric
These metric sets are then combined on individual dashboards in the process monitoring tool and clearly visualized.
Important: the challenges of process monitoring cannot be solved by technology alone. Software tools help you collect and analyze data and turn it into information. For that information to be translated into action, you need a living corporate culture of continuous process optimization. Introducing process management and monitoring and analyzing processes is therefore a change project whose success depends not least on the acceptance and motivation of your people.
Business Process Monitoring in Practice with the SoftProject Platform
Companies that want to monitor and analyze their processes in an automated way need a digital, intelligent software solution. Ideally, that means a holistic platform that integrates every part of Business Process Management — from data acquisition and process modeling through to the monitoring of processes.
The X4 BPMS from SoftProject — a low-code platform that fully digitalizes your process landscape — is the engine for this. And because reliable monitoring depends on reliable data and controlled execution, X4 BPMS sits within the wider SoftProject platform: data governance establishes the trustworthy data foundation your metrics are built on, seamless integration connects your source systems, and end-to-end automation runs and monitors the processes themselves.
Data Acquisition and Integration
Depending on the size and industry of your company, different data sources have to be brought together — for example, from ERP and CRM systems. We simplify this task with over 200 adapters that connect existing systems via drag-and-drop, including third-party systems and specialized requirements such as GIS (Geospatial Information Systems), insurance-industry data records, or IoT (Internet of Things). Our MQTT adapter, for instance, feeds sensor and control data from M2M manufacturing environments straight into your process monitoring. Data and documents can be converted between a wide range of formats and protocols, so your process monitoring speaks one shared “language.” Data models are transformed using the common XSLT 2.0 standard, and an integrated debugger checks every workflow.
A Trusted Data Foundation with dataspot. and MyDataCatalogue
Monitoring is only as good as the data behind it. With dataspot., SoftProject adds business-oriented data governance and data lineage, so the metrics on your dashboards trace back to clearly defined, well-understood data. MyDataCatalogue catalogs the systems and data sources that feed your monitoring, making it transparent where each KPI comes from — an essential prerequisite for audits, compliance, and trustworthy reporting.
Process Modeling
With X4 BPMS, you model business processes graphically by selecting the right process building blocks and inserting them via drag-and-drop, in line with the BPMN 2.0 notation standard and supported by industry-specific process libraries. Workflows can be simulated directly. Tasks for process participants are defined in just a few clicks using “Human Task” activity blocks.
Process Monitoring and Execution Governance
X4 BPMS provides individual dashboards with process KPIs that visualize the current as-is state in real time. Using web apps, you can also design interfaces through which each department interacts with the process and steps in to steer it when needed. Already digitalized your processes? Then use the Process Monitor app to monitor them and retrofit monitoring where it is missing. And where enterprise integration and execution have to be governed at scale, Phoenix adds enterprise integration and execution governance — so the processes you monitor are also reliably governed. With the data gained from monitoring, you can keep optimizing your processes.
Your Start Into Professional Process Monitoring
Various studies show that, on average, 20 to 30 percent of productivity is lost to poor or ineffective processes. Do you know which of your processes hold untapped potential and the biggest levers for optimization? Professional process monitoring with the SoftProject platform helps you identify weaknesses and derive concrete actions.
We would be glad to advise and support you on your path to process excellence — from a trusted data foundation with dataspot. and MyDataCatalogue, through seamless integration, to automated process monitoring with X4 BPMS and governed execution with Phoenix.
Edouard Cante is responsible for the strategic direction and further development of SoftProject’s product portfolio as Chief Product Officer. With a strong understanding of the market and a high level of innovative drive, he advances customer-centric solutions and ensures the company’s long-term competitiveness.
FAQs Process Monitoring
Why is monitoring and optimizing processes becoming more important?
Many common approaches to increasing efficiency have been exhausted, while workflows are becoming more complex and the environment more dynamic (“VUCA”). That is why business processes — no matter how well they were modeled — need continuous review and optimization. Process management is an iterative cycle.
What are the goals of process optimization?
The goals of process monitoring and the optimization derived from it can differ greatly from one company to the next. The overarching goals are typically reducing costs, minimizing process and cycle times, improving quality, increasing productivity, and making better use of resources.
What is process monitoring?
Process monitoring (business process monitoring) is an important sub-discipline of process management. It covers the measurement and analysis of process data with the goal of detecting deviations promptly, identifying their causes, and stepping in to steer the process where necessary.
Why are process metrics and process measurement important?
Processes can only be steered and optimized if process performance is measurable. Process monitoring therefore assigns processes metrics that are as easy to capture as possible and that make performance quantifiable in relation to the process goal (target-vs.-actual comparison).
How to monitore a process?
When monitoring and analyzing business processes, you define workflows that are triggered by specific process events — for example, automatically notifying the process owner when an assigned process metric exceeds a defined threshold.
What is the difference between a workflow and a process?
A process is a directed sequence made up of a series of interconnected activities that convert an input (e.g., materials, labor, information, capital) through a transformation into a defined output (e.g., products, services, revenue). The terms “workflow” and “process” are often used synonymously, but the concept of a process goes beyond the description of a mere workflow.
