Making Sense of the Automation Landscape

There’s an almost endless variety of tools and technologies that can automate every aspect of your business. There are solutions for customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), robotic process automation (RPA), IT service management (ITSM), and more. Many of these solutions can deliver quick wins for the business because they automate tasks that were previously done manually. However, when they’re pushed beyond their intended capabilities or implemented in a disjointed way, they trap value in business silos. This leads to technical and organizational debt, with a diminishing return on investment. The organization loses sight of processes and leaders don’t have the insights they need to sustain digital transformation.

Process orchestration eliminates silos of trapped value by enabling teams to coordinate the tasks that make up an end-to-end business process in a single process flow. Process orchestration is often compared to the role of a conductor in an orchestra, who makes sure everyone performs at the right time—they tell the musicians when each instrument needs to play to ensure that the song sounds as it should. The process orchestrator is the “conductor” of a process, coordinating and managing the interactions and dependencies of all the tasks in the process, be they manual or automated. 

What matters when choosing a process orchestration solution

While CRM, ERP, RPA, and ITSM tools offer some process automation capabilities, they don’t compare with a dedicated process orchestration solution. To truly eliminate silos of trapped value, you need a process orchestration solution that checks all of these boxes:

• End-to-end process orchestration: The solution can orchestrate every automated and manual task in an end-to-end business process across endpoints such as APIs, microservices, RPA bots, IoT devices, and AI/ML tools.
• Support for long-running processes: It has technical capabilities such as state persistence, which are needed to manage business processes that run for hours, days, weeks, or even longer.
• Process analytics and optimization: It provides actionable insights based on real-time and historical process data, with features that help teams identify bottlenecks, analyze performance issues, and continuously improve processes.
• One model approach: It uses a consistent process model visualization across design, monitoring, and improvement activities.
• Standards-based collaboration: It uses open standards to facilitate communication and alignment between business technologists, low-code developers, professional software developers, and anyone else who is a stakeholder for business processes.
• Developer friendliness: It doesn’t require software developers to adopt a vendor-specific way of working, but instead meets them in their comfort zone by fitting into both their development toolkit and application architecture.
• Flexible architecture: Its components are designed to work together seamlessly but can also be used independently, with easy integration into enterprise tech stacks. It offers on-premise, cloud, and hybrid deployment options.
• Low total cost of ownership: Open standards, developer friendliness, and flexible architecture combine to reduce the implementation cost for automation projects and keep ongoing maintenance and improvement costs low.
• Highly scalable and resilient: It leverages cloud-native technology to scale process volumes and to provide resilience against unplanned downtime and data loss.

Want a deeper look?

The newly updated version of Camunda Compared to Alternatives takes a deeper look at the landscape of automation tools and discusses how well they satisfy the qualities that are required to orchestrate business processes from end to end. The paper has been updated to reflect recent automation market developments and new challenges that organizations face when looking to digitally transform their business. Download your free copy today!