Introduction
IBM Business Automation Workflow on containers 25.0.1.0 now includes IBM Business Automation Insights, with features such as Intelligent Task Prioritization and Workforce Insights. IBM Business Automation Insights analyzes your business data and presents the results through clear visualizations, graphs, and diagrams. It offers real-time charts that give visibility into ongoing operations and help teams monitor key performance indicators. Intelligent Task Prioritization leverages advanced machine learning to optimize task assignments based on team members' historical performance. The Workforce Insights dashboard provides critical visibility into workforce performance metrics, process efficiency indicators, and team analytics across all your business processes.
Benefits
Organizations face constant pressure to deliver faster, more predictable, and smarter business operations. Workflow automation streamlines tasks and orchestrates processes; however, achieving true operational excellence also demands visibility. That’s where the combination of IBM Business Automation Workflow (BAW) and IBM Business Automation Insights (BAI) becomes a game-changer.
BAW automates your business processes. BAI provides the insights to understand, optimize, and continuously improve them. Together, they form a powerful foundation for data-driven decisions and ongoing operational excellence.
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End-to-end visibility across processes
BAI captures real-time event data from Business Automation Workflow processes and transforms it into clear, actionable dashboards. Leaders and operations teams can instantly see how business operations are performing end-to-end — no manual data gathering, no guesswork. A sample dashboard is shown below:
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Drive workforce efficiency and performance excellence
Intelligent Task Prioritization leverages advanced machine learning to automatically optimize task assignments based on team members skills and historical performance data. Intelligent prioritization transforms your Workplace into a strategic workforce optimization tool, directly improving productivity and reducing operational costs through smarter resource allocation.
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Gain competitive advantage through real-time business intelligence
IBM Business Automation Insights transforms your operational data into actionable business intelligence through the Business Performance Center (BPC). The Business Automation Workflow Workforce Insights dashboard provides critical visibility into workforce performance metrics, process efficiency indicators, and team analytics across all your business processes. This comprehensive view enables data-driven decisions that directly impact your bottom line.
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Built-in value: Simpler and more flexible deployment of BAI
IBM updated the Business Automation Workflow licensing model to make Business Automation Insights easier to adopt and scale. BAI is now included as part of the Business Automation Workflow license, giving organizations greater flexibility to use BAI’s reporting and analytics capabilities without the previous licensing limits.
This update significantly simplifies how customers deploy and expand BAI within their automation environment. Organizations can now:
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Use their existing Business Automation Workflow VPC entitlements to run Business Automation Insights, improving overall cost efficiency.
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Scale reporting and monitoring more easily, without the earlier 6-VPC restriction.
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Benefit from clearer and more streamlined licensing terms when planning or growing their automation landscape.
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While additional hardware or capacity may still be needed depending on the environment, this licensing change removes major barriers and makes it easier for teams to fully leverage Business Automation Insights as part of their end-to-end automation strategy.
High-level architecture
When Business Automation Insights is enabled within a Business Automation Workflow deployment on containers, the platform starts capturing operational events from the workflow run time. Once enabled, the workflow server sends these events to the Kafka instance included in the IBM Cloud Pak for Foundational Services layer. Business Automation Insights uses Flink jobs to consume and transform these events, and store the processed output into OpenSearch indices, creating structured, query-ready data for analytics. Business Performance Center then reads directly from the OpenSearch indices to deliver real-time insights into BPMN flows, case activities, and content interactions. This architecture ensures a continuous flow from event emission to visualization, giving teams immediate visibility into process performance and bottlenecks.
The diagram illustrates how Business Automation Insights integrates with Business Automation Workflow on containers.
Installing Business Automation Insights
When setting up Business Automation Workflow on a container deployment, the installation script includes an option to enable additional components. After running the initial setup script (./baw-clusteradmin-setup.sh), the next script (./baw-prerequisites.sh -m property -n <namespace>) displays a menu of optional services such as:
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Data Collector and Data Indexer
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Exposed Kafka Services
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Business Automation Insights
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Workflow/Workplace Assistant
Selecting Business Automation Insights ensures that the generated Custom Resource (CR) includes all the required Business Automation Insights configuration including Kafka. Once the CR is applied to the cluster, the platform automatically deploys the Business Automation Insights operands and starts the corresponding pods.
Setting up event emission
Once Business Automation Insights is active, event tracking can be enabled or adjusted at any time. Administrators can configure event emission for BPMN, Case, Content and Workforce components whenever needed. As soon as the events are activated, Business Automation Insights starts collecting and visualizing the incoming data, providing immediate insights into the selected runtime components.
Configuring BPM event sources
Configuring the BPM event emitter for IBM Business Automation Workflow container deployments
Configuring Case event sources
Configuring the Case event emitter for IBM Business Automation Workflow container deployments
Configuring Content event sources
Enabling Content Event emitter
Intelligent Task Prioritization and Workforce Insights Configuration
Configuring Intelligent Task Prioritization
Configuring Workforce Insights
Conclusion
You can now configure IBM Business Automation Insights for IBM Business Automation Workflow on containers and begin leveraging its capabilities. The integration of IBM Business Automation Insights into IBM Business Automation Workflow on containers 25.0.1.0 delivers a powerful blend of real-time analytics, AI-driven task prioritization, and workforce visibility—all within a secure, containerized architecture. These capabilities streamline operations and provide actionable insights that enhance efficiency and support informed decision-making across your business processes.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all the mentors and colleagues who provided valuable guidance and feedback throughout the creation of this blog.
A special thank you to @Prajwal A R, @RENJINI JAYAKUMAR, @SUNIL SATTI for generously sharing their insights and expertise on this capability for 25.0.1.
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