The Power of Enterprise Business Orchestration

Workato is a Gartner iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) Leader. Integration is at the core of the Workato platform. We help Enterprises make all their business applications and data work together. But Workato is more than that. The base unit of Workato is a “recipe”, which models a business process workflow. Integration is key, because the process workflow requires connectivity to business systems and data, but the business impact of the recipe is an end-to-end process automation. Integration is the means to an end. It’s not the end in itself.?

What if I told you that there’s even more? An analyst recently called Workato a business orchestration platform. We agree. We see a hierarchy of business value dependent on how you use Workato:?

• Use Workato for technical integration, and the benefit is a modern, connected IT. When considering a big SAP S/4Hana migration project, that technical integration benefit could still be worth millions.?
• When using Workato for business process automation, wall-to-wall operations are benefitting. We’re now in the COO territory of improving business efficiency and productivity.?
• But wait, there is still more: Enterprise Orchestration is what the CEO will care about. We’re now talking about agility, innovation, and competitive advantage for the company through business transformation.

But what exactly is Enterprise Orchestration? A good compass is Gartner’s “Composable Enterprise Architecture”. Gartner talks about assembling end to end business capabilities from building blocks. Sounds like APIs and microservices? Well, it’s now more than just APIs. The application building blocks have APIs, but also event channels, user interfaces and they are complemented by additional data and analytics building blocks. Enterprise Orchestration means to “compose” or “orchestrate” all of these building blocks. Low-code technology is fundamental to an enterprise orchestration platform as it allows a fusion team, which combines business and IT skill sets, to rapidly "compose" new solutions by orchestrating building blocks instead of developing a new application.

As the recent Harvard Business Review article describes, GenAI is adding a very potent, new building block to the business process composition game. By infusing a GenAI service into a process, the solution impact can be amplified tenfold. And because GenAI democratizes AI, it’s become easier to realize the business impact. If you haven’t considered Enterprise Composition/Orchestration yet, now - with the extra benefits of infused GenAI -? is definitely the time to start the journey.

So, Enterprise Orchestration is taking Enterprise Automation to the next level. It delivers a complete solution assembled from multiple building blocks inclusive of business logic and computation in addition to moving data. It includes human workflow steps. It’s event-driven and leverages data (amplified via GenAI). It typically addresses a need that isn’t part of a mainstream app, something that becomes a competitive advantage for the business, often at the front end (customer journey) of the business. It reduces data silos instead of creating new ones. It’s the innovation that happens between your business applications and your data. Your CEO will know and care about Enterprise Orchestrations.

Enterprise Orchestration in the Real World

But to best describe Enterprise Orchestration, let’s look at some real examples:

In SKU Onboarding

The first example we’ll consider is a SKU onboarding solution at a fashion retailer with lots of new styles of clothes. Information needs to be entered into multiple business applications including SAP before the clothes can be sold in a store. Clothes information is inputted once and then propagated across multiple applications. Multiple connectors, including to an API gateway and an event broker, are used and a low code user interface is added to facilitate centralized SKU input. This example exercises all 3 interface types of a composite capability that Gartner outlines: API, event channel and the UI. A workflow orchestration capability with a UI is added to bring the solution together.

In New Customer Orders

As I outlined earlier, orchestrating data, analytics and AI capabilities together with “regular” business applications is a “big deal” with tremendous business impact potential. In the case of GA Telesis , an aircraft maintenance company, a partnership with a reputable aircraft part producer led to over 30,000 emails in only one week. The solution to tame this wave of communication included leveraging GenAI to classify the emails, predict orders among them and then orchestrate a pricing quote based on lookups in multiple business systems (price, availability etc.). Adding the GenAI capability to the business applications and email workflow made this solution successful.

In Account-Based Marketing

Snowflake created their own ABM (Account Based Marketing) solution because they wanted to control the ABM scoring models. So they took their data science team with proprietary AI models, a data warehouse and Workato to assemble the orchestrated solution that ingests many different intent data sets, aligns with the CRM system and also executes workflows across multiple downstream functions, including advertising, sales development and sales. Low-code Orchestration can provide the freedom to create what you know is the best solution instead of having to adopt an out of the box application.

In Local Government

Government of New South Wales (NSW Government) , Rural Assistance Authority transformed from phone and letters to electronic self-service to approve farmers’ requests for aid following heat waves and flooding. By orchestrating a Support Portal together with a Document Store and the SAP payment system with the help of low-code technology, the entire process was fully digitized without having to write a single line of code.?

In Financial Transactions?

Another interesting example is the “tipping engine” of a fast food chain. Tips need to be distributed among all restaurant staff according to US state regulations and company policy. This requires accessing data from multiple business applications and then implementing the actual calculations. These calculations add a “business logic” capability to the solutions that turns an integration into an orchestration.

Orchestrations do not need to stop at the company boundaries. A large financial services company orchestrates payment solutions across its financial services APIs and the clients’ Finance applications. This approach makes it possible that not only clients with specialized development resources can make use of the payment APIs.

In Supply Chain Logistics

Low-code technology is key to making compositions/orchestrations happen. Without low-code, we’re back to developing new silos instead of assembling capabilities. DB Cargo Transfracht, a national railway company provides just-in-time logistics services to factories. Each factory has slightly different needs requiring customizations. With coding, onboarding a new factory took months. With an end-to-end low code stack including UI, workflow and integrations, that time is slashed to just a few weeks. Such agile orchestrations/compositions are a competitive advantage for the railway company.?

In Customer Support

At a large e-commerce company, orchestration drives innovation in customer support. Data from other systems, orchestrated with policy-based decision logic is used to guide the support staff and raise the level of customer experiences. By the way, GenAI is a key component to orchestrate powerful knowledge management solutions for customer support. It doesn’t always have to be something sophisticated, like using an LLM (large language model) for semantic self-service search. Distilling the knowledge from multiple support tickets involved in resolving a support incident into one knowledge item with the help of orchestrated GenAI is a relatively straightforward and extremely effective approach to make self-service support work.

What do all these orchestration solutions have in common??

• They are the most efficient way to implement process innovations that go beyond commodity application functionality
• They have the potential to add to the company’s competitive advantage
• They don’t just connect data from application A to application B, but they combine connectivity, workflow, events, data, analytics, AI, calculations and complementary human user interfaces into insightful solutions
• They don’t create new application silos, but they assemble existing application capabilities and leverage them into uniquely new solutions. The benefits of orchestrations arise reusing already available business capabilities and using a low code platform to combine them together

Orchestration / Composition transforms new application development into a better approach: smartly assembling existing capabilities, adding workflow and injecting data, analytics and AI. Innovating on business processes and customer experiences that matter has never been easier. And infusing Gen AI raises the potential tenfold. That’s the power of Orchestration. It’s combining integration, workflows, AI and application extensions into impactful business solutions.