Executive Summary

Every organization wants its core business processes to be executed accurately, thus reducing the risk of financial loss. System errors, human mistakes and outright fraud cost businesses worldwide untold billions of dollars each year. Fraud alone accounts for nearly one quarter of the waste in the US health care industry. Today’s business processes, which rely on automated systems to manage them, are not fully capable of achieving this objective. A core business processes of any organization is long-running such as buying or selling and typically consist of many business and IT processes. To monitor the entire business process instance is a very difficult task.

Generally, medium to large size organizations also employ a staff of controllers and auditors who look for inconsistencies in reports that are provided by different IT systems. Controllers are supposed to detect fraud and inaccuracy before the business loss occurs, while auditors try to recover lost money that the controllers failed to detect in time. However, even a large number of controllers and auditors are unable to monitor and control every one of the thousands of long-running transactions, that are executed in large organizations across distributed IT systems, humans and documents.

In this paper, we discuss an automated system for transactional control and monitoring across distributed IT systems and documents which would provide these benefits:

• Empower controllers with technology to keep long-running business transactions under strict control.
• Allow fewer controllers and auditors to effectively monitor a greater flow of data.
• Provide real-time alerts and dashboard features that enable ongoing monitoring and control of multiple long-running core transactions simultaneously.
• Provide timely security and transactional information management to detect insider fraud schemes.
• Identify any discrepancy in transactional data to keep distributed information secure.
• Reduce the need for time-consuming and expensive system integration and/or software development projects to improve existing production system.

The approach described below allows organizations to model almost any practical task as a long running business transaction processing (LRP), and to use the same software system for transactional control and monitoring. As a result, organizations can construct a wide range of new and important business solutions using the same prebuilt templates and components.

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