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Process Orchestration
Operaton is a community-driven, free, and open-source engine capable of executing BPMN, DMN and CMMN
In today’s digital landscape, business processes are more complex than ever. They span across disconnected systems, modern microservices, legacy databases, and human decision-makers. Trying to manage this complexity without a clear strategy leads to bottlenecks, errors, and a poor customer experience. Process Orchestration is the definitive solution to tame this chaos, enabling you to automate, manage, and improve your most critical end-to-end workflows with unparalleled visibility and control.
What is Process Orchestration?
Process Orchestration is the automation and coordination of complex, long-running business processes that connect disparate components, including people, systems, and devices. Unlike simple workflow automation that handles linear tasks, process orchestration manages the entire end-to-end journey, including complex logic, error handling, and state management over long periods.
At its core, it involves using a central “conductor”—a process automation platform—to manage the flow of work between different endpoints. These endpoints can be anything from an API call to a microservice, a task for a human employee, or a transaction in a legacy system.
This coordination is typically modeled using the global standard BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation). BPMN creates a visual blueprint of your process that both business stakeholders and IT developers can understand and collaborate on, ensuring your automated workflows perfectly match your business goals.
The 3 Core Benefits of Process Orchestration
Adopting process orchestration delivers transformative value across your organization. While the benefits are numerous, they can be distilled into three major advantages that drive efficiency, agility, and growth.
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1. Achieve Unprecedented Visibility and Collaboration
Modern businesses often suffer from information silos where different departments and systems don't communicate effectively. Process orchestration breaks down these walls. By creating a visual model of your end-to-end process in BPMN, everyone gets a single source of truth. Business analysts can design and improve the flow, while developers can see exactly which services and APIs need to be integrated. This shared understanding eliminates guesswork, reduces errors, and fosters powerful collaboration between business and IT.
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2. Drive True Business Agility and Scalability
In a fast-moving market, your ability to adapt is your greatest strength. Process orchestration decouples your business process logic from your service logic. This means your core process flow is managed by the orchestrator, while your development teams are free to update, deploy, and scale their individual microservices independently. If one service fails, the orchestration engine can manage the error, retry the task, or escalate it without bringing the entire process to a halt. This creates a resilient, scalable, and highly agile architecture that can evolve as your business needs change.
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3. Gain End-to-End Control for Continuous Improvement
You cannot improve what you cannot see. Process orchestration gives you a real-time, bird's-eye view of your most important workflows. The orchestration engine tracks the state of every single process instance, allowing you to monitor performance, identify bottlenecks, and see exactly where delays occur. This data-driven insight is invaluable for continuous improvement, enabling you to optimize your processes for speed, cost-efficiency, and a superior customer experience.
Your Quick Start Guide to Process Orchestration
Getting started with process orchestration is more straightforward than you might think. By following a proven, iterative approach, you can deliver value quickly and build momentum for wider adoption.
Step 1: Model Your First Process
Start small but think big. Choose a critical business process that is causing pain or has high potential for improvement. Work with business stakeholders, analysts, and developers to collaboratively map out the end-to-end process using BPMN. Focus on creating a clear, shared understanding of every step, decision, and integration point.
Step 2: Automate and Integrate
With your process model complete, it’s time to bring it to life. Use a process automation platform to execute your BPMN model. Your development team can then focus on integrating the necessary endpoints—connecting the model to your microservices, public APIs, legacy systems, and front-end applications where your employees work.
Step 3: Monitor, Analyze, and Optimize
Deploy your newly automated process and begin monitoring its performance in real-time. Use the platform’s analytics to gather data on execution times, identify bottlenecks, and collect feedback from users. This creates a powerful feedback loop, allowing you to continuously refine and optimize the process for maximum efficiency and impact.
