7 Signs You Need Workflow Orchestration

When you take on the responsibility of managing your business processes, you often have to consider what will make the most sense at every stage: what tasks are important, what optimizations are important, and even what information is important. Another decision that businesses have to make eventually with their workflows today is whether they’re in need of a bigger, better way to organize and execute tasks. In other words, you eventually must decide if you need workflow orchestration.

There’s a method to this kind of decision, especially, and for the most part, it simply depends on what you currently have to deal with in your business processes. By looking at your current needs as a business, you can actually diagnose this yourself — if any of the below statements are true, it’s likely that you do, in fact, need such a software to help you manage your business process.

You Have To Initiate and Orchestrate Tasks Manually

Whether you’re initiating tasks manually with each activity, each job, each new iteration, or you’re simply setting up your own scripts to schedule the automations of each task, there’s a better way to handle your workflow. Doing this yourself takes unnecessary time and effort, and the fixes aren’t always easy. However, with workflow orchestration, it’s actually very easy to fix, schedule, and automate tasks in a distinct and well-structured manner.

You Deal With Multiple Virtual Machines

If you’re regularly moving workloads between various cloud containers and siloed microservices, it’s likely to get difficult when coordinating these. Multiple machine activities within the process means it’s likely to be easier and more productive to implement automation, as well as to have a platform that can provide visibility of performance for each machine in a holistic way. That’s a perk of workflow orchestration, which is designed to string together all these machines under one management software.

Your Business Process Deals With Numerous Dependencies

You might find that your workflow is built with a lot of interdependent pieces. Like cogs in a machine, each step should be moving and affecting another step — but if you’re not using workflow orchestration tools, you won’t have the same synchrony that happens with such a machine. Dependencies within the process mean that the workflow would automatically benefit from having a centralized platform to connect, integrate, and orchestrate them all, and that’s where a workflow orchestration platform comes in.

You Struggle With Compliance Standards

One of the things that can trip up any business is the way in which their process complies (or doesn’t comply) with industry standards and regulations. Data governance is a huge concern for a business that uses data in any form, and it’s even more important when certain industries like finance or healthcare create an even more specific set of standards that must be followed, as is often the case. Workflow platforms offer centralized protection by securely and intimately governing the data used in the process — protecting you and your clients from non-compliance.

Your Service Quality Is Waning

If you think your service needs work, that your products are declining in quality, or that your offerings are proving inconsistent, there are a lot of possible issues that could be the cause. However, in most cases, the cause is something that can be helped by implementing more comprehensive control over the process as a whole: time efficiency, cost efficiency, or even quality control standards can be improved by letting a machine govern, automate, and execute the work where possible. This machine, i.e., a workflow orchestration tool, will take on the repetitive and time-consuming tasks, making those results more consistent and more error-proof, while letting you personally see to the other, more important factors of quality in your given product or service.

You’re Using Too Many Tools To Automate

When using a vast suite of containers, be they located virtually or physically, it’s often the case that people who simply automate the process don’t do so as a whole: because each activity is based in a separate container, there are also separate tools to automate. If this is the case for you, there is a better way — the universality of a workflow orchestration tool is instrumental in enabling automation for each silo, each microservice, but all under the same umbrella, the same control center. Whatever you plan to do with your numerous tasks is up to you, but to have numerous automation tools in the mix is to over-complicate your situation. It may be better to condense and take on one tool to rule them all, in this case.

You Are Looking To Scale Your Business Throughput

A business needs to grow at some point, and in most cases, there’s a growth that involves increasing your business’s throughput, with a greater number of orders coming through for the service or product that you’re offering. If you plan on scaling your business in this way, the considerations you need to make include putting your business process into the hands of workflow orchestration software. With this in place, you can add and implement more containers, newer machines, or other methods of aiding your business in increasing and retaining incoming business.

Conclusion

There are a lot of reasons why one would switch to workflow orchestration tools — but the most important are the ones above. These signs are indicators that your business needs help one way or another in order to take the next step in quality, quantity, or otherwise. That help can come in different forms, but workflow orchestration is one way to tackle all of the above.