Unleash the power of BPM: Master end-to-end process orchestration
BPM can orchestrate everything for end-to-end business process automation: microservices, services, monoliths, legacy, people and robots, making automation useful beyond “mechanization.”
1. What is orchestration?
Orchestration means smooth coordination of information systems, applications, and services. In the context of business processes, orchestration also involves coordinating the work done by people.
When process orchestration uses BPM technology to coordinate these elements across the business, IT teams can see how the various systems involved are called into play throughout the end-to-end automation, and can supervise everything in a single platform to optimize operations. BPM adds value to the automation of individual parts of a business process by offering a way to manage all of it together.
2. Orchestrating all the pieces: what a workflow engine is built for
A BPM workflow engine is built to orchestrate - and automate - any enterprise service, for example:
- microservices
- operations managed through APIs
- integrations with legacy and proprietary specialty systems
- integrations with “monoliths” such as SAP and other ERP platform operations
- IoT integrations
- and others, of course!
Let’s have a look at what it means to orchestrate some of these common information systems...and then, add humans and their robotic assistants to the picture.
3. BPM to orchestrate modern information systems: microservices & services
Microservices are autonomous deployable entities that can interact with each other directly as needed. Microservices architectures are widely used for enterprise business applications, as they allow great flexibility and deployability using cloud-based components.
A BPM engine can be used to manage the workflows of a set of individual microservices that are used together in an end-to-end business process. The engine manages each of the pieces only as they are needed. A digital automation platform provides a BPM engine, and also offers graphical notation to define the overall orchestration logic so it is easier to understand the end-to-end picture.
Services in business processes can include SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS software that is accessed automatically or manually to exchange data and perform operations (usually through APIs). So orchestration of services as needed in a sequence of tasks that make up a business process can be done with a BPM engine through extensions, two-way connections between the engine and the service. BPM engines can handle multiple types of APIs and can even allow creation of custom APIs for proprietary and legacy systems.
4. BPM to orchestrate legacy systems: monoliths and API-less
Legacy systems in companies worldwide are still supporting critical functions. These companies face a double challenge - keep up with the flexible, agile competition but also keep their foundational, legacy information systems.
BPM is ideal to coordinate multiple systems that need to participate in processes to deliver new/better services to customers. If a legacy system is accessible through APIs, then a BPM engine can orchestrate them directly.
And as many legacy systems do not have APIs, there are tools such as software robots provided through RPA that are very useful for interacting with legacy “old-school” user interfaces.
5. BPM to orchestrate work done by people
Customer-facing and employee-facing systems or applications can involve many interactions between people and systems. Employees and agents manage backend operations in processes, for example, while customers may be the ultimate end users of user-facing processes. A digital automation platform with a UI design capability is well suited for orchestrating the tasks that have to be done by people and also require access to a mix of enterprise information systems.
A BPM engine provides capabilities to manage human interactions: work assignment and delegation rules, deadline management, prioritization, multiple validation levels, and so on. Orchestration through a BPM engine can help link people and systems where needed so a company or organization can offer a smooth customer experience.
The BPM engine is also easily integrated with user interfaces (web forms). A smooth back-end operation can invisibly fetch customer data from a legacy user database, call the appropriate employee(s) into the process when needed, coordinate all the necessary calls to and from the newest microservices, and ends with a customer who has obtained what they needed, when they needed it, through a pleasant and satisfying interaction.
6. Orchestrating software robots: another dimension of automation
There’s a new set of actors in business processes. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) replaces repetitive tasks (or sequences of actions) that formerly had to be done by people.
RPA robots can interface with microservices, services, and other software normally accessed by people through a user interface. These robots perform standardized, repetitive tasks faster and more accurately than humans, and don’t get bored or make errors on tedious work like data extraction, data entry, or data search.
A BPM engine can integrate smoothly with RPA robots to control when they are deployed, and orchestrate their role in the process, in the same way that it provides two-way access to other software.
Calling a robot to run an operation is conceptually the same as calling a service. However, robots can also have a user interface, instead of interacting only through APIs. As noted in BPM to orchestrate legacy systems above, robots are very useful for interacting with legacy “old-school” user interfaces that do not have APIs.
7. Key advantages of using Bonita for orchestration
- Bonita provides a visual modeling tool based on the BPMN standard that uses graphical notation to define the orchestration logic so it is easier to understand “the big picture.” The Bonita digital automation platform couples the BPMN visual standard with the BPMN-driven engine.
- BPMN modeling allows definition of how tasks are assigned to the right services, to the right people, and so on, along with rules for routing data and data handling.
- The workflow design can include error handling by the engine, automatically, wherever errors can happen, using exception paths, timers, and other BPMN elements. If human intervention might be needed, that can be included in the workflow logic as well.
- Bonita’s BPM engine compiles data on process execution and individual process cases to use for status monitoring, reporting, and analytics. With information on how processes perform, organizations can continuously improve.
- Bonita adds an effective means to integrate RPA - with UiPath through a technical partnership and dedicated connectors, and with others through customizable Bonita connectors.
- A Bonita Test Toolkit, to write and execute tests, accelerates testing and deployment of complex, core, and critical automation projects at each step of a process, as well as end-to-end.
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Bonitasoft understands what business needs to be successful. We’ve built our BPM-based business process automation platform to accelerate business process application delivery for efficiency, continuous improvement, and innovation. Bonita’s flexibility and platform extensibility equips professional developers and DevOps teams with powerful tools to develop highly customized, fully integrated business applications faster.
Here are 3 ways to learn more:
- Build highly personalized, process-based applications today, for free, with our open source Bonita Community Edition.
- See how you can reinvent your business processes with BPM. Watch our on demand Bonita Platform Demo.
- Interested in full project lifecycle support and services from development to operations? Try unlocking the power of Bonita Enterprise Edition. Contact us to learn more.
Bonitasoft knows its business. This article was not created with the use of artificial language technology.
