[Bonita 7.11] The need for new digital processes arises

Covid has affected how teams work

The Covid crisis, which has resulted in widespread change in working environments in many companies, has highlighted the importance of process automation in organizations, both for new processes, for existing processes that are incompletely automated, and for processes that cross departmental boundaries.

Covid prompts the need for new processes

An example of a brand-new need for an automated process came up for a Bonita platform user in Canada, a consortium of medical and health research centers in Quebec.  Their IT team worked with Bonitasoft process automation experts to develop a digital process to screen individuals who need to physically access shared spaces in different locations. That process, put into place in April for about 300 users, is still in use today and is anticipated to be expanded to be accessible to 15-20,000 users.

Automation and optimisation of processes like this Canadian consortium’s generally arise from the need to:

• deliver the right actions to the right people at the right time 

• be able to interact and orchestrate services from different systems (including legacy systems, SaaS, and RPA robots) 

• provide the right visibility about process execution, to fix issues and anticipate problems posed by inefficiencies such as bottlenecks due to missing resources

Typically, project teams working on these projects are composed of people with different skills and backgrounds, and who can be scattered around the organization in different departments and locations.

To support these teams the development team at Bonitasoft has continued to work effectively over the past months and has just released a new version of its open source and extensible digital process automation platform, Bonita v 7.11. 

Their (remote!) work enhances the value of this digital automation platform that supports better collaboration and accelerated development for both IT & business teams.

From his home office in the west of France, Bonitasoft CEO and co-founder Miguel Valdes Faura said:

The Bonita platform enables effective team collaboration by providing a clear separation between the visual programming and the coding capabilities of the platform. This allows users with both programming and non-programming skills to work together in process automation and optimisation projects.

What's new in Bonita 7.11

Bonita v 7.11 offers a new Bonita connector software development kit (SDK) based on best-of-breed-tools for developers to create and test customized connectors. This means that developers can work in continuous-improvement mode on connectors outside the platform. Bonita features that externalize programming development to allow professional developers to code and test using their favorite tools, frameworks, and methodologies are key for developers to work in ways that are most efficient for them.

Bonitasoft’s usability specialists and customer-centered design team continue to improve the development team’s user experience. User interfaces in the development environment have been streamlined for better efficiency with fewer clicks, and now designers can automatically generate and customize form widgets from business data. Using these visual programming capabilities simplifies the creation of application user interfaces.

And a brand-new capability in the Bonita v 7.11 platform further supports collaboration giving excellent visibility for all project stakeholders, by quickly producing comprehensive documentation on the process and application directly from the platform environment.

We’ve also continued our investment on monitoring capabilities of the Bonita platform, to grow and scale with our customers’ deployments, both in the office and in the cloud - to bring those processes smoothly to wherever remote workers are.

Everything available in the Bonita v 7.11 downloadable platform is also available with Bonita Cloud, which provides fully managed services for the Bonita platform.

It takes good collaboration between IT and business to make all of this happen. And as the Canadian medical research centers’ experience has shown -  even when people come together again, there will be new processes driven by “a new normal” that will be in need of digital automation.