At the outset, it’s important to note that process automation tools (including but not limited to robotic process automation softwares) work towards streamlining specific tasks or single processes. It assists organizations in getting rid of repetitive and routine tasks, improving overall efficiency, reducing the operational costs and adhering the team productivity. Thus, process automation aides employees in paying undivided attention and focus towards more strategic and fruitful tasks. These simple yet cumbersome to perform tasks could include uploading of a file within an application, populating documents and templates from multiple sources, copy pasting information between various document sources, and downloading, uploading and emailing a file to someone.

On the other hand, Process Orchestration involves streamlining a business process in an end-to-end manner. This could be accomplished through the creation and usage of multiple automations which could connect and work with each other, or by building a multi-step intelligent automation. Thus, business process orchestration is a typical management approach which connects the involved technologies, workflows, and people within the periphery of end-to-end automated processes. Consequently, our research at the QKS Group validates that the process orchestration enables the monitoring and automation of organizational workflows for ensuring smooth and continuous running of the organizational processes. Orchestration could be applied to any number of processes across departments, could also involve a platform bot which would bring the automations to the respective applications which the employees might already be using.

Essentially, while automation fast tracks workflows or single tasks, orchestration optimizes complex processes and streamlines a bunch of automated tasks. Orchestration is thus enabled with advanced logic and is capable of complex decision making based on the inputs and outputs of a particular automated task, while simultaneously coordinating multiple different tasks on the go. Ideally making strategi and wise use of both, business leaders could achieve and maintain an edge in terms of their operational and strategic decision making, effectively scaling their businesses.

Process Orchestration essentially co-ordinates the flow of tasks and information providing -

• Accountability – since the appropriate employee and tasks are mapped effectively, maintaining all the communication and work within the platform to avoid errorsis made possible. Thus, significant reduction in the missed SLAs (service level agreements) is achieved delivering on time and consistent work.
• Optimized Resource Capacity – through fixing bottlenecks, automating tasks and speeding up processes
• Autonomy and visibility achieved through metrics and workflow, promoting real-time visibility for the decision makers and technology leaders to positively transform the business cycle. Ultimate enhanced customer satisfaction can be achieved through real-time visibility into multiple process stages. Thus, problem identification and redressal would be faster, drastically reducing the mean time to resolution (MTTR).
• Integrating multitude of systems and applications for reducing manual errors and streamlining processes. This also leads to simplifying complex workflows, ensuring adherence to stringent compliance rules, and promoting enhanced workflow automation. Making use of appropriate connectors and APIs, enterprises could easily integrate services including enterprise resources planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and human resources management (HRM) systems.Thus, as against integrating disparate tools individually, integrating them through a single orchestration platform is more effective.
• Optimized Collaboration and Communication – between diverse departments, teams and systems ensuring seamless business processes.
• Reduced reliance on custom scripts – by reducing the use of manual coding for task automation, process orchestration promotes automation of complex business processes minus the need for building and maintaining complex system architecture.

Thus, we at the QKS Group believe that process orchestration (and the relevant tools that power it) presents a solid case for itself, making every dime definitely worth investing in it! Right from increasing the lead conversion ratio, minimizing the risks associated with emergency offboarding of employees, all the way to improving the productivity and retention rate of new hires - it almost guarantees transformative business results. Since process orchestration makes use of application APIs and not the user interfaces, even though the application of a participating organization eventually change, the in-built automations and connections remain unaffected, promoting robust reliability at scale. Promoting a low-code/ no-code environment further ensures that business teams can lucidly integrate the relevant applications and automate the processes without writing a line of code. Ultimately, process orchestration ensures creation of better experiences for the users - by integrating the most important stakeholders including partners, employees and customers within the internal workflows, and thus connecting them under a ‘total experience’ phenomenon. 

To know more about our published study - SPARK Matrix Evaluates Vendor Landscape for Intelligent Process Orchestration (IPO)

To understand more around our Thought Leadership - QKS EMC™ Foresight: Intelligent Process Orchestration (IPO) – The Way ahead for Automation  

Author: Apoorva Dawalbhakta, Associate Director Research, at QKS Group