What is process orchestration?
Using automation tools to coordinate and speed up a group of business processes that are all linked is called process orchestration. To do this, tasks, workflows, and decision-making processes may need to be automated across multiple systems and departments within a company.
Process automation does not show companies their workflows from start to finish. Using process coordination, you can see the whole process in one place, which makes it easier for your team to work together and talk to each other.
Process Automation vs. Process Orchestration
IT can use conventional automation tools, such as native job schedulers, custom scripting, robotic process automation (RPA) tools, and business process management (BPM) tools, to automate some tasks. You can schedule these jobs, have them happen when certain IT or business events happen, or do them whenever you want.
Automation and process orchestration tools can do some of the same, but significant gaps exist between them.
It is easy to connect systems when using process orchestration tools with universal connectors, direct integrations, or API adapters. Traditional automation tools, on the other hand, only work with systems from certain companies, like Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP.
Process management tools also make combining different technologies and tools easy for businesses. Drag-and-drop workflow designers with low code can be used to add data and dependencies from these new tools to current end-to-end processes.
Process coordination platforms can also keep an eye on and fix these processes and the tools and programs they use.
Synonyms
- Automated workflow coordination
- Business process automation
- Business process orchestration
Why process orchestration is important
Process orchestration is an integral part of business process automation. It ensures that all a process’s moving parts work together smoothly and efficiently. This eliminates mistakes made by hand, reduces wait times, and makes customers happier.
What Process Orchestration Does and Why
In its most basic form, process orchestration controls how information and tasks move through a business process.
This includes a lot of different tasks:
- Automating work processes. Automating tasks over and over, making complicated processes more accessible to use, and ensuring that business rules and regulations are followed.
- Getting along. Putting together different programs and apps to make things easier, reduce mistakes, and work faster.
- Working together. Getting teams, groups, and systems to work together and talk to each other more quickly so that business processes run smoothly and efficiently.
- Being seen. Giving real-time views of all process steps, such as tasks, workflows, and decision-making processes, allows problems to be found and fixed quickly.
- Setting up. Improving the process always means finding places where it can be better.
Why process orchestration is a good idea
Process orchestration solutions are better than standard automation methods, including making things more efficient, lowering costs, and making customers happier.
It makes things easier by bringing together different tools
Once upon a time, automation was only used when it made sense or if a particular piece of software could automate a specific task.
One tool could be used to set up batch processes to run overnight, while another could collect customer information. Several custom scripts could then be used to move data between different systems.
On the other hand, process orchestration uses an expandable automation tool to combine separate jobs into complete processes.
IT teams can oversee the whole process lifecycle from one place, which includes planning, testing, keeping an eye on, and overseeing.
reduces the need for special scripts
Process orchestration makes businesses more resilient by cutting down on the need for unique scripts.
Instead of writing code by hand to automate tasks, process orchestration lets companies do it without having to write code or build a complicated system design.
MTTR (mean time to settlement) goes down.
Businesses can find and fix problems quickly by seeing all process stages in real time. This reduces the time it takes to fix problems and the downtime.
Using a process management tool, they can give better customer service, making customers happier and more likely to stick with them.
Makes compliance easier
Process orchestration makes compliance more accessible by handling audit and credential needs. This makes sure that business processes follow legal and regulatory rules.
For example, employee expense claims can be checked immediately and matched to the proper receipts. This cuts down on mistakes made by hand and ensures the reports are correct.
Integration with other programs has been made easier
Integrating other tools from a single management platform is faster and easier than doing it one at a time.
Businesses can easily connect services like customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and human resource management (HRM) systems using connections and application programming interfaces (APIs). This lets all of these systems communicate with each other clearly and efficiently.
Who uses process orchestration?
As a process gets more complicated, process management becomes more and more critical. Process orchestration is relatively new compared to process automation, but it is quickly becoming popular in many fields. For example, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing all use it to automate and simplify tasks like order-to-cash and procure-to-pay.
The prominent people who use process orchestration are:
- Developers: rolling out new features, operating systems, and functions; handling the deployment pipeline; automating code integration and testing; and making version control work smoothly.
- IT Operations teams: keeping an eye on and running workflows, making sure systems work at their best, automating routine maintenance tasks, and overseeing changes to system configurations and infrastructure.
- Human resources departments: bringing new employees on board and letting them go; handling requests for leave and benefits; planning training and professional growth paths; and automating internal communication processes.
- Compliance teams: automating compliance checks, ensuring that legal standards are met, planning risk management procedures, keeping track of changes to the law, and making changes to processes as needed.
- Sales and marketing: automating the process of qualifying and sending out sales leads, handling customer segmentation and personalization, and streamlining the sales process from lead to conversion.
Different kinds of process orchestration
Process planning can be divided into different types based on how it is used or what area it mostly serves.
Here are some of the most essential kinds of process orchestration:
Putting together applications
Application orchestration is automatically setting up, coordinating, and managing complicated computer programs, services, and systems. It makes it easier to offer software and services by automating and coordinating tasks to make deployment go faster and with fewer mistakes.
Putting together services
Service orchestration is automatically setting up, managing, and coordinating different network services. It is essential in telecom and IT services because it allows many interconnected services to work well and reduces the need for human intervention.
Coordinating the cloud
Cloud orchestration is all about managing and coordinating the delivery of automated tasks and processes in the cloud. It includes tracking, reporting, keeping up with cloud resources, and automating deployments.
This can make a cloud-based system much more efficient, cut costs, and ensure that resources are used more effectively.
Putting together security
Aligning and merging different security systems and automating security tasks are part of security orchestration. It makes finding, investigating, and reacting to cyber threats easier. This reduces response time and the chance of making a mistake when handling security issues.
Journey Music Composition
Journey orchestration is the process of planning, managing, and automating the steps a customer takes as they interact with a company through different channels and touchpoints. It means using data to give each customer a unique and optimal experience, which makes them happier and helps the business grow.
What You Should Look for in Software for Process Orchestration
As many as 96% of IT workers say process automation is necessary for most businesses to go digital. Despite this, most businesses have not yet achieved their goal of automating their processes.
On the other hand, process orchestration is a relatively new area growing as more businesses see how useful it is.
Still, there are some things that all process orchestration systems should have in common:
Adapters for REST APIs
Using REST API interfaces to make systems talk to each other lets different systems work together without problems. This improves process automation by coordinating tasks across different systems and apps. People working for businesses that use cloud-based and on-premises services will find this very useful.
For example, a store that uses different tools for CRM, order processing, and managing its stock. They can automate the whole order delivery process with a process orchestration tool with REST API adapters.
When a customer makes an order, an automated process begins. First, the inventory management system uses its API to check how much stock there is. Next, the order processing system uses its API to process the order based on the inventory data.
At the same time, the API of the CRM system adds order information to the user record. It is possible to do all this with very little human help, which significantly reduces the chance of mistakes and dramatically boosts productivity.
Real-time monitoring throughout the whole lifecycle of the process
Real-time tracking is an integral part of process orchestration software with many benefits, the most important of which is that it can significantly reduce the time needed for troubleshooting.
Because real-time monitoring gives businesses clear visibility, they can find and fix problems as soon as they happen, which is crucial for keeping automated systems and processes running at their best.
The best thing about real-time tracking is that it lets you find and fix problems throughout the lifecycle.
When a problem does happen, quickly finding and fixing it stops it from getting worse and cuts down on downtime, which can directly affect how productive and efficient you are. Additionally, because it tracks patterns and trends in real-time, companies can improve their processes to stop problems before they happen.
Adding auto-remediation methods and artificial intelligence to real-time monitoring makes it even more helpful. With auto-remediation, if the tracking system finds a problem, it can fix it without help from a person.
When AI is added to real-time tracking, it can provide intelligent automation that cuts down on runtimes even more, stops delays before they happen, and improves service level agreements (SLAs).
For instance, an AI monitoring system could use past data patterns to predict possible problems or bottlenecks and take steps to avoid them.
Self-Service Portals for People Who Aren’t IT Experts
One of the main ideas behind process orchestration is to combine and make more manageable automatic tasks, like those used in IT, business, or help desk services.
A self-service portal gives non-technical users an easy-to-use interface that lets them handle their automated tasks independently.
The first benefit of these platforms is that they give non-IT users more power. Process management is open to everyone because it has an easy-to-use interface that lets users start, stop, or restart automatic processes.
Users can handle their workflows without waiting for IT to step in. This speeds up processes and makes everyone more productive overall.
This user-centered approach also helps everyone in the company understand and take responsibility for processes, which can lead to better teamwork and new ideas.
Developing with little code
High code complexity requires work that has to be done by hand. Some DevOps features that may be part of process orchestration tools are dependency mapping, process modeling, and communication tools. But low-code development is the most important of these traits.
Low-code platforms, as the name suggests, are made to cut down on the need for hand-coding, which makes putting together end-to-end processes easier.
Most low-code development platforms have an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that hides the complicated code underneath.
This visual method lets developers and people who aren’t developers create and set up automated processes without needing to know much about programming.
