Business Orchestration

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The IT Challenge

IT departments are under pressure, to do more, to better support the changing needs of the business, but with less resource and less budget.

This requires IT to work smarter not harder. Flowable allows IT to automate various aspects of the business. This can include being the glue that connects various different business applications to ensure that business flows through the organization, to automating the deployment of new and updated business solution or automatically responding to IoT devices and microservice events.

Flowable allows IT to deliver more value to the business, reduce development time, increase business agility, reduce costs and, more importantly, provides an opportunity to improve the experience for your customers.

Centralized Microservice Coordination

To meet the needs of business, reduce complexity and increase business adaptability, IT is moving from monolithic systems to deploying business applications based on microservice architectures. But finding a way to easily link these services to provide a seamless business flow is proving difficult.

Flowable allows disparate microservices to be connected and coordinated using a number of delivering models:

  • Microservice Orchestration: Using Flowable as a central “orchestrator” to drive and monitor interactions between different microservices. This approach allows Flowable to control the flow of information and sequence the tasks where there is a requirement for synchronous processing of tasks and activities
  • Microservices Choreography: Flowable easily fits into an event-based model with each microservice reacting to unique events. This approach works well for processes or tasks that can be executed in parallel or asynchronously
  • Hybrid Approach: Both Orchestration and Choreography have benefits and trade-offs. So, a hybrid approach may be more beneficial. Flowable plays the part of “orchestrator’ for some microservices while responding and managing events-based interactions for other microservices

In each of the examples above, systems are designed and updated using no-code, visual modelling tools based on industry standards (including BPMN, CMMN and DMN). This approach makes it easy to visualize the complete business process flow and make changes safely as business needs evolve.

Streamline IT Operations

In business, differentiation is built not bought. To be able to compete, companies need to develop applications and solutions that focus on delivering competitive advantage, providing greater efficiencies, reducing costs and delivering an outstanding experience for their customers. The technology landscape is changing, with the move to the cloud, adoption of containers, micro-services and continuous development using CI/CD and agile development; all of which means the pace of change is increasing. IT needs tools to help them manage the update, testing and deployment of system updates. Intelligent Business Automation solutions from Flowable can help IT:

  • Model End-to-End Processes: Use no-code, visual tools based on industry standards (including BPMN, CMMN and DMN) to model the end-to-end process and all the interactions between different systems and tools to automate key IT processes
  • Connect Toolchains: Flowable can be used to connect interrelated toolchains, linking different development, testing, packaging and release tools to drive the development and release of updates
  • Automate Deployment: Connecting with existing tools to automate the deployment of new solutions to the cloud using a combination of standard container technologies (such as Docker) and orchestration tools (such as Kubernetes)

IoT Automation

Companies are looking to exploit new IoT technologies to drive business efficiencies. Deploying any number of devices, including mobile devices, cameras, microphones, RFID readers and wireless sensors, to capture a range of information and data. But the volumes of these data sets can’t be analyzed and acted upon by humans alone. Companies are combining IoT and AI / ML technologies with Flowable Intelligent Business Automation solutions to automatically respond to a range of external events. Flowable customers can:

  • Monitor External Events: As IoT devices are monitoring, collecting data and reporting on external conditions, Flowable can be used to automatically respond to these business events
  • Analyze Big Data: Use decision support to automatically decide how best to respond based on real-time data gathering. Selecting the next best action and drive a process across systems
  • Handle Exceptions: Readily capture exceptions, using powerful BPM engines to initiate human activities to help resolve issues that can’t be automatically fixed. Communication can be through mobile of wearable devices with context-specific information enabling the user respond and fix the issue quickly and efficiently

Synchronize Business Applications

Many organizations use a range of different business applications (ERP, CRM, ECM, WCM, Finance, Customer Portal, and so on) to manage the day-to-day running and recording of business activities. Most of these systems are siloed applications, while business activities can span multiple systems, with the need for information to be accessible to multiple different users. In addition, a single transaction may need to update multiple different systems, and if an update is not completed then the whole transaction needs to be rolled back. This results in many tasks that could be automated being relegated to human interaction.

Flowable allows an organization to model the complete business activity using no-code modelling tools. Allowing organizations to:

  • Develop Visual Models: Flowable allows IT to use visual modelling tools to see the complete flow of information across multiple systems, across different departments and drive information through the complete organization
  • Industry Standards: Using industry standards (including BPMN, CMMN and DMN) Flowable makes it easy to build connections that span multiple business applications without the need to understand esoteric programming languages
  • Transaction Integrity: By managing the flow of information as a single transaction, Flowable can roll back a transaction if an error occurs, ensuring the integrity of business data and activities

This approach allows IT to deliver flexible business applications faster that can evolve as the underlying systems change or the needs of business develop over time.