Composability for Best in Class Process Orchestration

As industries integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in their business processes, they must determine where and when to make these changes. There is a fine line between automating for automation’s sake and making strategic decisions about the best way to orchestrate your process with the introduction of AI agents and other automation components.

With Camunda, organizations can be confident that their investment in building the right foundation for a flexible and scalable orchestration journey.

Camunda’s composable architecture allows users to combine integrations and AI agents where they add the most value but still leaves room to exchange them as needed in the future. This approach lends itself toward taking organizations from a tactical solution that might solve a very specific problem all the way to reaching a best-in-class technology that automates complex end-to-end business processes managing multiple integrations. This best-in-class solution extends your solution to auditability and governance while remaining flexible.

But how do you get started on this journey? The key is having the right core product for these requirements, like composable process orchestration.

Process orchestration is the core

Organizations always need to automate processes—sometimes it’s a small, straightforward process; other times it’s more complex and integrated. These initial single-solution processes are often patched together over time, leading to poorly designed and performing workflows.

Process orchestration is a technology that coordinates the various moving parts (or endpoints) of a business process, and sometimes even ties multiple processes together. Process orchestration helps you work with the people, systems, and devices you already have—while achieving even the most ambitious goals around end-to-end process automation.

Introducing automation elements, like an AI agent or a bot, might improve the process, but you want to confirm that these are strategic and automating the right tasks effectively.

As you look at future requirements and technologies, you’ll want to steer clear of vendor lock-in to keep your processes flexible for future requirements and initiatives. Essentially, you must future-proof your solutions to allow for fluctuations in requirements, technologies, and regulations. You need to innovate your orchestration, and this is where Camunda comes in to help. With Camunda, process orchestration is the core of your solution.

Consider a building-block approach to this goal, as represented in the image below. Start with a strong foundation of integration capabilities like reusable connectors, AI agents, RPA bots and executable BPMN. Then build business capability processes, such as claims review, adjustor investigation, and adjudication, that use these integrations.

With this solid bedrock, you can build strategic end-to-end processes using these business capabilities—for example, automobile claims handling.

Now it’s time to review your customer journey and value streams that are then implemented as these end-to-end processes. Finally, you can work with senior leadership to build strategic value by business area.

This approach allows you to develop enterprise-scale process orchestration optimizing strategic value to your organization.

The importance of composability

We’ve talked quite a bit about the fact that Camunda is composable. What does that mean? It means that Camunda is both integrated and flexible.

Camunda’s process orchestration sits at the core of the automation technology stack while providing an open, collaborative, and scalable platform. With composability, you can combine anything to truly automate and optimize your process orchestrations, like the example shown below.

As mentioned, to build that solid orchestration foundation, you want to start with what are commonly called task agents—reusable components that you can use in multiple processes to address specific tasks.

Task agents can be made up of executable BPMN and automated tasks like RPA bots that automate a specific task or set of tasks. This might be reviewing data and making decisions or interacting with other systems autonomously or semiautonomously.

These task agent building blocks can be used in multiple processes and can also be easily replaced as technology changes without modifying your strategic end-to-end processes. These are the key to a composable architecture, providing you the flexibility to integrate and automate while orchestrating larger, more complex processes.

The benefits of composability for process orchestration

The benefits are many with this architecture. Not only does it build the foundation for future-proofing your organization, but there are other key benefits. Let’s go over a few.

Flexibility

The core benefit of a composable architecture is the technical ability to add, swap, or remove individual automations or services when needed.

For example, you may have built a custom integration to a system that now offers a REST API that would streamline the integration. You can swap your existing task agent with an updated agent that embraces the new technology to access the REST API. Alternatively, you may no longer require access to a particular legacy system. You can now easily remove the deprecated component from your process.

As shown in the following diagram, you can exchange any bot in the process with the one that best suits the requirements for your business process. With a composable architecture, you can strive for best in class by selecting the right task agent for your needs.

End-to-end process insight

Having comprehensive understanding and visibility into your entire process enables you to ensure strategic alignment with your business objectives. Using your key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics, you can verify that customer expectations are being met and continue to optimize your processes within your organization.

Process auditability

With only individual automated tasks, you may not be able to clearly track and verify compliance across your overall processes. You may only have chunks of information that have to be reviewed independently, limiting the ability to trace specific events, decisions, and individuals that may have been part of your process.

However, if you’ve put the proper task agents in place in your end-to-end processes, you achieve auditability of the process from start to finish. With true auditability, you can confirm that processes are executed consistently, meeting performance metrics. Having auditability in your process allows you to identify risks and highlight areas for improvement.

Process governance

Process governance is the system of policies, roles, and frameworks that ensure that business processes are effectively managed, consistently applied, and aligned with organization’s objectives. It establishes the proper insight and accountability for the design, execution, monitoring, and continuous improvement of processes.

Process governance is nearly impossible without full process orchestration. With composability, you extend process governance to individual tasks as well as the overall process. Effective process governance ensures that business processes stay aligned with organizational goals, operate efficiently, and adapt to changes quickly, while maintaining transparency and control.

Using tools like BPMN and the ability to track process modifications, you have proper visibility into your operations. You can easily audit your processes to confirm compliance with regulations and the effectiveness of any modifications.

Proper change management with documentation, compliance requirements, and performance data are significantly easier to achieve with a composable architecture.

Future-proof your applications

Let’s face it, technology is a moving target. It’s important to implement a solution that allows you to be flexible enough to take advantage of new tech stacks when needed but keeps you on the right track for best-in-class process orchestration. A composable architecture allows you to plug in the right task agent for the job while still providing visibility into the end-to-end process.

For example, with a composable architecture, you can easily maximize the use of AI in your organization. You can choose, combine, and orchestrate your AI agent framework from pro-code to low-code, building best-in-class process orchestration solutions.

Conclusion

Camunda’s composable architecture for process orchestration is a powerful and adaptable solution for today’s business challenges. By leveraging its core process orchestration one-model approach, organizations gain the flexibility to build, modify, and scale workflows with ease, ensuring alignment with new technologies.

Camunda excels in delivering best-in-class process orchestration capabilities. Implementing our composable architecture provides robust auditing, governance, and future-proofing, enabling businesses to maintain compliance, enhance transparency, and drive continuous improvement. As organizations navigate the complexities of their digital transformation, Camunda’s architecture empowers them to orchestrate processes with precision, adaptability, and confidence, setting a strong foundation for success.