Process BI – the Power in the Gray Area!

You’ve been using Process BI for a few months now and there are some things that are obvious wins. It’s made your life much easier in terms of managing your workflow. No more old Excel spreadsheets with manually tracked dates to ensure you didn’t forget to complete or check on a process. No more manual counts to understand the number of form submissions for your process. Whatever your monitoring task was; it’s now done for you.

What about information that is available, but isn’t so obvious? Go ahead and step through this with me.  So, you go in and check on your process, which is named Process 113. Your name is Originator 3. It’s almost like you were born for this type of work.

You’re specifically wanting to check out Form 856. You make a selection in Form Status of “Running” because you know that 856 is running. Well, you don’t see Form 856 anywhere. Weird. Then it dawns on you that maybe it was canceled! You navigate over to the configuration panel and turn on canceled processes. Still nothing is showing up. Now you’re thinking that Process BI is playing hide-n-go-seek with you. But then you notice that the Form Status filter on the left side has two different shades of gray.

Now you’re intrigued. You have a strange flashback to those corporate IT emails that test you for phishing and think, “I’m not sure I should click on this.” So of course, you decide to click on it and see what happens. You see your selection of “Running” and then you see three other values with a light gray background and the rest have a dark gray background.

You decide to click on the other three values instead to see what that does. Boom! Form 856 is back, and you see it was actually rejected today. You’ve got your answer but now you’re wondering about the gray?

The real power of Process BI is in the gray, whether that be the dark or light color.

Process BI was built on the Qlik platform so anyone who is familiar with it will understand, but those who aren’t familiar are still confused. Qlik uses a patented associative engine to put the data together. When you see the light gray color that means that the values in light gray are still associated with the selection set and can be added. Since the Form Status of “Rejected” is there it could have been added and you would have seen Form 856 come back. Selecting the other values is like saying ”Running or Approved or Completed or Rejected.”

The dark gray is equally as powerful. The dark gray means that it is not associated with your current selections and if you chose one of the excluded it will clear out all of the current selections. For example, if you had data that was extracted about a specific process that you were managing, you could look at it for outliers. Clicking around and making selections, you could see that your process has many rejected records. That seems odd because that’s usually in the dark gray section. You look back and see that Jane has rejected 23 different submissions from Ronald. Looking at the specific forms, you ask Jane why and she points out a very minuscule detail about how Ronald was using all upper case in his requests. Jane said she felt like he was yelling at her during his request. You have a quick chat with both of them and come to a resolution. Now you’ll be able to monitor that process for efficiency.

Hopefully now you can see why being able to visualize the gray is so powerful! It can lead you down paths you didn’t know existed, as well as show you problems that you also had no clue about. I like to call this data exploration at its finest. This particular type of data exploration will spur thought. It’ll create questions that you didn’t ask before. You can make selections based on those questions and see what the data is telling you right at the speed of thought. Sometimes, it tells you that it needs your help. Next time make sure you don’t ignore what’s in the gray!

If you haven’t explored what Process BI can do for you, learn more here.

If you have Process BI and would like to see how we can get you detailed data, reach out to us.

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