By Bernd Ruecker – One of the core benefits companies gain from digitization is the ability to generate efficiencies or gain a competitive advantage by automating business processes. Executives roundly agree on this issue. Recent automation market research shows 95 percent of executives surveyed say process automation drives more business productivity, and 93 percent say it improves business growth. Moreover, more than 90 percent say they plan to increase investments in process automation implementations over the next two years. 

At the same time, companies are struggling to get all of their automation projects under control. Nearly three-quarters of executives in the same survey agree that real-world, mission-critical processes are difficult to maintain. While companies invest more in automation, they face challenges in automating processes end-to-end. They need more coordination of multiple automated tasks of very different natures. This can be achieved through new technologies that master the art of process orchestration. The biggest roadblocks to solving process orchestration are process complexity and endpoint diversity. We’ll explore each of these next. 

Automating a simple sequence of steps isn’t rocket science, but very few business processes are, in reality, that simple. End-to-end processes are complex. They don’t follow a linear pattern; instead, they involve numerous tasks running in parallel, must wait for events or business conditions, or be able to interrupt activities at any time if necessary. Such processes are not only harder to implement but also hard to scope and define with multiple stakeholders.  

The second obstacle in process automation is the variety of endpoints. Every process consists of a series of tasks that need to be orchestrated. Every job may require integrating a different endpoint—a person, team, or department, another internal or external system, IoT, and physical devices.

Integration of various endpoints is not only an integration challenge—it can also lead to more operational problems and complexity that need to be mastered and tamed. From a system perspective, while microservice architectures might solve some integration challenges, every enterprise must connect internal or external legacy systems for processes to be efficient. The same spectrum of complexity applies to human and device-related process integration and orchestration.  Read On: