Skip to Main Content
Digital Business Automation Ideas


This is an IBM Automation portal for Digital Business Automation products. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:

Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,

Post your ideas
  1. Post an idea.

  2. Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.

  3. Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.


Please use the following category to raise ideas for these offerings for all environments (traditional on premises, containers, on cloud):
  • Cloud Pak for Business Automation - including Business Automation Studio and App Designer, Business Automation Insights

  • Business Automation Workflow (BAW) - including BAW, Business Process Manager, Workstream Services, Business Performance Center, Advanced Case Management

  • Content Services - FileNet Content Manager

  • Content Services - Content Manager OnDemand

  • Content Services - Daeja Virtual Viewer

  • Content Services - Navigator

  • Content Services - Content Collector for Email, Sharepoint, Files

  • Content Services - Content Collector for SAP

  • Content Services - Enterprise Records

  • Content Services - Content Manager (CM8)

  • Datacap

  • Automation Document Processing

  • Automation Decision Services (ADS)

  • Operational Decision Manager

  • Robotic Process Automation

  • Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere

  • Blueworks Live

  • Business Automation Manager Open Edition

  • IBM Process Mining


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.


Status Submitted
Created by Guest
Created on Jul 28, 2026

Provide native support to calculate and report historical Business Turnaround Time (Business TAT) for completed BPMN tasks using configured Work Schedules and Holiday Schedules

The customer requires the ability to calculate the Business Turnaround Time (Business TAT) for both historical and future BPMN tasks.

Business TAT represents the elapsed working time between task lifecycle events (for example, task creation/claim and completion) while excluding:

  • Non-working hours
  • Weekends
  • Holidays defined in the configured Work Schedule and Holiday Schedule

Currently, IBM BAW records only lifecycle timestamps (creation, assignment, completion, etc.) and uses Work Schedules and Holiday Schedules during runtime for timer and deadline processing. However, the product does not calculate or persist the actual business elapsed duration for completed tasks.

As a result:

  • There is no database column containing Business TAT.
  • There is no REST API or Java API that returns Business TAT for completed tasks.
  • There is no supported mechanism to retrospectively calculate Business TAT for historical completed tasks.
  • Existing scripting approaches (for example using tw.system.calculateBusinessDate()) only support implementing custom calculations for new process instances and cannot be applied to already completed tasks.
  • Performance Data Warehouse (PDWDB) only captures data after it has been enabled and therefore cannot be used to calculate Business TAT for historical tasks completed before PDWDB configuration.

The customer has approximately 500,000 completed BPMN tasks that require retrospective Business TAT calculation. Their reporting architecture already extracts BPMDB data into a dedicated Data Warehouse, so reporting does not execute directly against the Process Server database.

The requested enhancement is to provide a supported IBM capability to calculate and expose Business TAT for historical and future completed tasks using the configured Work Schedules and Holiday Schedules. Possible implementations could include one or more of the following:

  • Native Business TAT calculation stored when a task completes.
  • A supported API or administrative utility capable of retrospectively calculating Business TAT for historical completed tasks.
  • Bulk backfill capability for existing task history.
  • Business TAT exposure through supported reporting interfaces (for example PDWDB or reporting APIs).
  • Ability to process large historical datasets efficiently without requiring custom implementations.

This enhancement would enable customers to perform SLA reporting and operational analytics based on actual business working time rather than calendar elapsed time, while eliminating the need to implement and maintain custom business-calendar calculations outside IBM BAW.

Idea priority Medium