Firms have been offered new tools to help optimise the performance of processes and meet regulatory requirements. Business Objects and IDS Scheer released new products heralding growing integration between business intelligence (BI), process modelling and performance management.

BI software giant Business Objects' new suite, BusinessObjects XI for Operational BI, has a Process Tracker module to document business processes; and a Process Analysis function to visually represent the performance of processes in real time and indicate whether they are under control.

Rasmus Andsbjerg of analyst IDC said operational BI could help make firms' more responsive by giving them real-time business data to make more timely decisions.

Richard Neale of Business Objects said the system could guide decision-making for end-users to ensure they follow optimised and compliant business process frameworks. "By providing end-users with automated guidance it lets firms ensure repeatable best practice processes, instead of allowing [processes] to be performed on an ad-hoc basis."

The vendor has also signed new alliances with business process management (BPM) specialists, including CommerceQuest, Nsite and Singularity, to integrate their functionality with BusinessObjects XI for Operational BI. Andsbjerg said Business Objects' automated decision-making functionality would allow the vendors to move closer to delivering "BPM in real time". Andy Bailey of CommerceQuest said BPM systems needed the data provided by analytical BI to better manage the performance of processes.

Bailey added that it made more sense for CommerceQuest to integrate with Business Objects than develop that functionality itself.

Separately, German-based IDS Scheer unveiled the latest versions of its Aris suite for business process modelling at its annual user conference in Leipzig. A new web-based process modelling suite, called Aris Business Architect, offers an improved user interface while the latest version of the Aris Process Performance Manager suite allows managers to better track processes' performance across departments.

Board member Wolfram Jost, responsible for software, said while IDS Scheer remains a close partner of SAP it is still working with Microsoft to integrate Aris's process modelling functionality with the Micro- soft Business Solutions portfolio.