Workflow orchestration can be done on a small scale, say for one department or team, or it can be done on a grand scale across many different departments or teams. One of the best ways to achieve this is by using software catered specifically to improve orchestration and cohesion for business processes. If you want to learn about different workflow software, here is a good start:
The Benefits of Workflow Orchestration for Businesses
The benefits of workflow orchestration are many. In order to understand how workflow orchestration benefits your business, let’s take a look at some specific ways that it can increase productivity and the overall performance of your business.
Some of the benefits of workflow orchestration are direct and obvious, such as increased productivity, an increase in quality, and lowered overhead.
With workflow orchestration, it becomes much more likely that your employees will accomplish tasks on a regular basis. You won’t have to worry about a missing step in a process because a scheduler is keeping an eye on it.
Work productivity will significantly increase as the automated flows won’t be prone to the same sort of human errors that plague businesses – the only time a workflow orchestration will output errors is if it is out of human error itself during the workflow modeling process.
Transparency is also improved because the employees are working according to a process. All jobs in the workflow are linked together, so if a piece of data isn’t correctly received, the workflow will show that on a screen to everyone in the company.
What is Workflow Orchestration Software and How Does it Work?
A workflow orchestration software will take your business process(s) and provide an underlying framework for how the work should be completed. These frameworks can be as simple as a number of steps that need to be performed in a certain order, or more complex for an entire company or even department to understand how the work should be completed.
This framework can be mapped onto a specialized workflow orchestration engine, which is used to automate the process. If you’re using workflow orchestration software, you are taking a raw set of data and turning it into a predetermined, pre-configured system for your workflow.
This means that when you’re in the middle of a workflow, your automated workstations are simply executing what the framework has defined for them to do.
What are some Key Examples of WorkFlow Orchestration Software?
There are a considerable variety of workflow orchestration tools, and while some are designed for personal use, the most robust are able to be implemented in high-level business operations. One such example of this is Kubernetes, whose features as an open-source platform make the management of containerized workflows easier than ever.
Kubernetes organizes containers into groups based on application functions, or other logical units for easy discovery, so deployment can be simple. Using Kubernetes for large workflows (be it a global app development or a machine learning venture) gives each workflow the ability to rollback when deployments are not ideal, scale horizontally when deployments are going very well, or even add features to specific clusters of orchestration without having to change the “upstream code”.
Camunda is yet another example — one that offers high visibility of the microservices that are orchestrated within the platform. Using a platform with this level of visibility means that at every stage of a high-level process, be it software development or service rendered immediately to clients, will receive regular maintenance to remain consistent with the rest of the process.
Camunda also seamlessly communicates between each container, each API integrated tool, and each user. This means that the end-to-end quality of production is heightened — and that the overall monitoring and QA stages of any project are given more attention and support from the whole team.
Ultimately, workflow orchestration is just a term for linking together business processes, but what sets it apart from simple automation tools is how complex workflow orchestration engines can be.
For example, some engines can accept data from business process modeling notations and create pipelines that are much more complex than simply a series of instructions. The most sophisticated examples of workflow orchestration systems use flows and templates that are fully documented.
Conclusion
Although workflow orchestration is a difficult term to define, it has come to define the way businesses are running their business. In a business where there is a lot of paperwork, you often have to create a work order, assign a task to someone, and wait for the person to complete the task.
With workflow orchestration software, tasks can be assigned to individual employees. There is no need to run additional processes for this task. As a result, tasks will be completed on time.