The principal benefits of BAM pertain to enhancing the capacity of an enterprise to effect intelligent business decisions and reinvent their systems to take full advantage of opportunities.

This concept includes the acquisition, aggregation, analysis and presentation of data in real time (typically regarding sequences of time values and their evolution). Such data is often obtained in the context of a business process modeled by upstream activities of business process management (BPM).

However, BAM can be used independently in the absence of a business process management (BPM) solution. BAM in itself is a business solution designed to provide real-time summary of the situation of business activities to operations managers and management.

The purpose of such solutions is, among other things, to allow early reaction in case of changes, and in the best case, to act pro-actively. In this approach, the technical infrastructure is regarded as support for business activities.

It is essential to gather around the table players and technical occupations, each bringing their knowledge of business processes, providing other sources for calculating the selected indicators.

The establishment of a business-oriented supervision passes through three stages: firstly, the modeling process, then the choice of indicators to monitor. And finally the identification of sources of information necessary for enabling the link between business and technology.

A business activity monitoring (BAM) solution typically includes a dashboard which aims to summarize the status of key activities the company. They provide visibility into the values associated with this condition, as symbolized an interpretation of this state.

They can also alert management on unexpected deviations in the activities, and analyze their cause. The dashboard of a BAM solution is different from the one created by a business intelligence solution. Indeed, the BAM solution collects, synthesizes and presents real-time operating data (push mode) while the business intelligence solution aggregates data from a database (pull mode).

Some of the publishers that utilize a BAM solution as Get-Process (Income Monitor) SL Corporation (RTView), IDS Scheer (Aris Process Performance Manager), Hewlett-Packard (HP Business Process Inside), Microsoft (BizTalk Server R2 Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server), Systar (BusinessBridge), Tibco (BusinessFactor) and WebMethods (webMethods BAM).