As the Operations Manager, you are interested in best-of-breed operating efficiency. You need the fullest transparency into each and every transaction as it makes its way through the business, as well as the ability to flag and to systematically resolve errors as they occur. Sarbanes Oxley et al. do not change those requirements – your professional pride is probably still the strongest regulatory driver here.

However, Compliance is not just about doing a great job. Compliance requires that you can demonstrate that you have done so and that you have adhered to documented procedures and guidelines in the process. The monitoring environment you deploy must provide for ad-hoc generation of reports as required by the regulators. You will need detailed Audit Trails of errors and of the steps taken to resolve them, encompassing both automatic and manual intervention. Processing rules and workflows – including detailed change history – must be documented. Performance metrics are needed to support process analysis and improvement if Operational Efficiency is to remain a competitive advantage. In short, your requirements list for a process monitoring solution has just grown considerably!