IBM® ILOG® ODM Enterprise is a platform to implement and deploy corporate custom solutions for optimization-based planning and scheduling. Developing a realistic plan or schedule that provides the best possible balance between customer service and revenue goals is hard work. With ILOG ODM Enterprise, business leaders can make better decisions through what-if analysis, scenario management, and collaboration. This IBM RedpaperTM publication showcases the optimization scenario of the Supply Demand application for ILOG ODM Enterprise. This scenario highlights the product features. It includes suggested practices for using IBM Cognos® and InfoSphereTM offerings to extract data and build reports with ILOG ODM Enterprise driving the import and export of data. The target audience for this paper is IT specialists and IT architects who implement ILOG ODM Enterprise solutions and decision makers such as IT managers.

Today many organizations face challenges when developing a realistic plan or schedule that provides the best possible balance between customer service and revenue goals. Optimization technology has long been used to find the best solutions to complex planning and scheduling problems. A decision-support environment that enables the flexible exploration of all the trade-offs and sensitivities needs to provide the following capabilities: Flexibility to develop and compare realistic planning and scheduling scenarios Quality sensitivity analysis and explanations Collaborative planning and scenario sharing Decision recommendations This IBM® Redbooks® publication introduces you to the IBM ILOG® Optimization Decision Manager (ODM) Enterprise. This decision-support application provides the capabilities you need to take full advantage of optimization technology. Applications built with IBM ILOG ODM Enterprise can help users create, compare, and understand planning or scheduling scenarios. They can also adjust any of the model inputs or goals, and fully understanding the binding constraints, trade-offs, sensitivities, and business options. This book enables business analysts, architects, and administrators to design and use their own operational decision management solution.

This IBM® RedpaperTM publication describes the IBM Intelligent Pervasive Platform and IBM Intelligent Pervasive Platform Sensor Extender. Intelligent Pervasive Platform (IPP) enables you to create mobile applications that seamlessly deliver customized information and services to mobile users, based on their profile and location data. IPP Sensor Extender (based on IPP) supports the collection and standardization of sensing device data from sensor platforms that consist of sensing devices, packaging devices, and gateways. After standardization, the sensing device data can be forwarded to other applications that report, analyze, and display this data. IPP Sensor Extender supports the Internet of Things and machine-to-machine communication. This paper provides the following information about IPP and IPP Sensor Extender: A description of each solution The high-level architecture for each solution, including key components Details of the data models for each solution, including examples of common data representations Integration with other IBM products Use in industry solutions The paper is written for developers and others who are interested in using IPP and IPP Sensor Extender to create mobile and sensing applications.

IBM® Smarter Asset Management for Integrated Mill Operations helps metals companies optimize asset performance and maintenance in the large, unified facilities known as integrated mills. The solution described in this IBM Redbooks® Solution Guide gives metal-making companies direct visibility into asset usage and operational health. It helps executives and managers at all levels make decisions that are based on accurate, up-to-date reports on the running conditions and performance of their most critical assets. It also includes predictive analytics features that can help companies get ahead of the curve in terms of plant maintenance and turnarounds. By combining sensor-based condition monitoring with advanced analytics, the solution delivers actionable, data-driven insights to aid in daily operations, shutdown and turnaround management, and regulatory compliance . It helps reduce asset downtime by ensuring maintenance is performed exactly (and only) when needed, and improves overall productivity, which increases operational equipment efficiency (OEE).

This IBM® Redbooks® publication introduces operational decision governance and describes in detail how to implement it using the IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) platform. ODM allows businesses to automate and manage day-to-day operational decisions. It provides an integrated repository and management components for line-of-business, subject-matter experts to directly participate in the definition and governance of rules-based decision logic, organized in decision services. Governance of changes to decision services is of particular importance and value. This book describes how organizations can choose between the built-in ODM decision governance framework or a custom governance based on manually managed branches. Related topics, such as access control, permissions and user management, are covered and give a full view on decision service governance. You will find this book valuable if you are using or considering the usage of an operational decision management system in your organization, either with ODM on-premises or ODM on Cloud offerings. This book was written to help assist the following target audience in applying Decision Management technology successfully: IT Project Managers need to understand how decision governance differs from IT Governance, and how ODM straddles both worlds to facilitate agile change. IT Technical Architects need to understand how to architect ODM to sit inside both the IT and business worlds. Business Analysts need to understand the processes for changing business policies using ODM Decision Center. Business Rule Development Teams need to understand the best way to structure rule projects for scalability and maintainability.

Systems of record (SORs) are engines that generates value for your business. Systems of engagement (SOE) are always evolving and generating new customer-centric experiences and new opportunities to capitalize on the value in the systems of record. The highest value is gained when systems of record and systems of engagement are brought together to deliver insight. Systems of insight (SOI) monitor and analyze what is going on with various behaviors in the systems of engagement and information being stored or transacted in the systems of record. SOIs seek new opportunities, risks, and operational behavior that needs to be reported or have action taken to optimize business outcomes. Systems of insight are at the core of the Digital Experience, which tries to derive insights from the enormous amount of data generated by automated processes and customer interactions. Systems of Insight can also provide the ability to apply analytics and rules to real-time data as it flows within, throughout, and beyond the enterprise (applications, databases, mobile, social, Internet of Things) to gain the wanted insight. Deriving this insight is a key step toward being able to make the best decisions and take the most appropriate actions. Examples of such actions are to improve the number of satisfied clients, identify clients at risk of leaving and incentivize them to stay loyal, identify patterns of risk or fraudulent behavior and take action to minimize it as early as possible, and detect patterns of behavior in operational systems and transportation that lead to failures, delays, and maintenance and take early action to minimize risks and costs. IBM® Operational Decision Manager is a decision management platform that provides capabilities that support both event-driven insight patterns, and business-rule-driven scenarios. It also can easily be used in combination with other IBM Analytics solutions, as the detailed examples will show. IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced, along with complementary IBM software offerings that also provide capability for systems of insight, provides a way to deliver the greatest value to your customers and your business. IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced brings together data from different sources to recognize meaningful trends and patterns. It empowers business users to define, manage, and automate repeatable operational decisions. As a result, organizations can create and shape customer-centric business moments. This IBM Redbooks® publication explains the key concepts of systems of insight and how to implement a system of insight solution with examples. It is intended for IT architects and professionals who are responsible for implementing a systems of insights solution requiring event-based context pattern detection and deterministic decision services to enhance other analytics solution components with IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced.

IBM® Operational Decision Management (ODM) is a family of products used by IT and business users to create and manage business decision logic throughout their organization. This IBM RedpaperTM publication offers advice on all aspects of performance, including hardware, architecture, authoring, quality of service, monitoring, and tuning. The advice is based upon preferred practices and experience gained from real customer situations. This paper is aimed at a wide ODM audience, including IBM employees and customers, and provides useful information to both new and experienced users. Although the product family is known as IBM WebSphere® Operational Decision Management (WODM), at V8.0, with V8.0.1 the the name is now simply IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM). The performance information in this paper is based on V8.0 of this product family and differences introduced with V8.0.1 are pointed out.

Decision management is emerging as an important capability for delivering agile business solutions. Decision management is not a solution in its own right, but must be integrated into the solutions or business processes that it supports. In this IBM® RedpapersTM publication, we describe the recommended best practices and integration concepts that use the business events, business rules, and other capabilities of IBM WebSphere® Operational Decision Management V7.5 (WebSphere ODM) to provide better decision making in those solutions and business processes.

Business rules are everywhere. Every enterprise process, task, activity, or function is governed by rules. However, some of these rules are implicit and thus poorly enforced, others are written but not enforced, and still others are perhaps poorly written and obscurely enforced. The business rule approach looks for ways to elicit, communicate, and manage business rules in a way that all stakeholders can understand, and to enforce them within the IT infrastructure in a way that supports their traceability and facilitates their maintenance. Boyer and Mili will help you to adopt the business rules approach effectively. While most business rule development methodologies put a heavy emphasis on up-front business modeling and analysis, agile business rule development (ABRD) as introduced in this book is incremental, iterative, and test-driven. Rather than spending weeks discovering and analyzing rules for a complete business function, ABRD puts the emphasis on producing executable, tested rule sets early in the project without jeopardizing the quality, longevity, and maintainability of the end result. The authors’ presentation covers all four aspects required for a successful application of the business rules approach: (1) foundations, to understand what business rules are (and are not) and what they can do for you; (2) methodology, to understand how to apply the business rules approach; (3) architecture, to understand how rule automation impacts your application; (4) implementation, to actually deliver the technical solution within the context of a particular business rule management system (BRMS). Throughout the book, the authors use an insurance case study that deals with claim processing. Boyer and Mili cater to different audiences: Project managers will find a pragmatic, proven methodology for delivering and maintaining business rule applications. Business analysts and rule authors will benefit from guidelines and best practices for rule discovery and analysis. Application architects and software developers will appreciate an exploration of the design space for business rule applications, proven architectural and design patterns, and coding guidelines for using JRules.

In today's competitive, always-on global marketplace, businesses need to be able to make better decisions more quickly. And they need to be able to change those decisions immediately in order to adapt to this increasingly dynamic business environment. Whether it is a regulatory change in your industry, a new product introduction by a competitor that your organization needs to react to, or a new market opportunity that you want to quickly capture by changing your product pricing. Decisions like these lie at the heart of your organization's key business processes. In this IBM® RedpaperTM publication, we explore the benefits of identifying and documenting decisions within the context of your business processes. We describe a straightforward approach for doing this by using a business process and decision discovery tool called IBM Blueworks LiveTM, and we apply these techniques to a fictitious example from the auto insurance industry to help you better understand the concepts. This paper was written with a non-technical audience in mind. It is intended to help business users, subject matter experts, business analysts, and business managers get started discovering and documenting the decisions that are key to their company's business operations.