Unlocking Business Value with Process Orchestration in Public Sector

This is Part 3 of my Unlocking Business Value series. See also articles for?Financial Services ,?Insurance ,?Nonprofits ,?Manufacturing , Telecommunications , Retail and Healthcare Payers .

In the evolving landscape of the public sector, organizations are seeking ways to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance service delivery.? Process orchestration holds immense potential for enabling operational excellence and achieving remarkable outcomes while consuming less taxpayer resources. By harnessing the power of automation, organizations can streamline workflows, eliminate manual tasks, and unlock a wealth of benefits that positively impact both their budgets and citizen experience.??

What is process orchestration?

Process orchestration is a way for organizations to manage and coordinate different tasks and activities. It organizes and automates various tasks, making sure they happen in the right sequence and involving the right people or systems. The tasks might be purely technological, such as saving a record in a database, sending an email or invoking an API.? Humans may be involved to make critical decisions or augment a process in unique ways.? Processes may also be augmented with adjacent technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA) or artificial intelligence (AI).? When errors occur, orchestrated processes may take corrective actions as defined by business requirements, providing resiliency.???

Let’s dive into the business value process orchestration brings:

1?? Enhanced Efficiency and Productivity

Process automation empowers organizations to optimize their operations by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. By leveraging streamlined, automated decision making and minimizing manual interventions, agencies can achieve substantial gains in productivity, reduce errors and improve outcomes.? ? Camunda customers have reaped numerous benefits of process automation, including saving 96% of backoffice time by enhancing and streamlining their business processes.

2?? Accelerated Service Delivery

In the public sector, timely and efficient service delivery is important. Process automation plays a pivotal role in expediting service delivery by reducing cycle times and eliminating bottlenecks. For instance, automating the review and approval process for permits or licenses can dramatically reduce turnaround times, enabling citizens and businesses to receive the necessary approvals quickly, thereby enhancing citizen satisfaction and fostering economic growth.? Camunda customers typically enjoy 3X faster delivery of services.??

3?? Cost Optimization and Resource Allocation

Process automation offers organizations an opportunity to optimize costs and allocate resources effectively. By automating routine administrative tasks, agencies can free up valuable human resources, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities that require critical thinking and decision-making. Additionally, automation eliminates the need for redundant manual efforts. Camunda customers have seen an impressive decrease of 83% in the size of teams required to support business process automation.

4?? Improved Compliance and Risk Management

Compliance with regulations and policies is crucial in the public sector. To ensure adherence to these standards, process automation is highly valuable. It can automate tasks such as data validation, audit trails, and report generation, thereby reducing manual errors and promoting consistent compliance. This helps organizations mitigate risks and improve governance. By automating and orchestrating compliance processes, agencies can effectively monitor and enforce measures, track adherence to regulations, and generate audit trails. This lowers the risk of non-compliance and enhances transparency and accountability in government operations.? Camunda automation customers have enjoyed a reduction of 90% in the number of incorrect process occurrences.?

5?? Improved Visibility

Process orchestration offers real-time insights into operations, allowing leaders to efficiently monitor progress, identify obstacles, track performance indicators, and make informed decisions to improve processes.? The value of this is significant.? It enhances overall performance and supports all of the other benefits of process orchestration.??

Common Use Cases

Let’s discuss some common use cases that combine these benefits:

? Streamlining Service Delivery: Process orchestration can optimize and automate the delivery of government services, such as social welfare programs, tax administration, healthcare services or licensing and permitting processes. By orchestrating the workflows, reducing manual work and integrating systems across different departments, citizens can experience more efficient and seamless service delivery, reducing bureaucracy and enhancing their overall experience. ? For example, automating citizen request management allows for efficient handling and tracking of inquiries, complaints, and service requests.? Since introducing Camunda in 2019, Città di Lugano has reduced the time for specific administrative tasks and related costs by 90%, increased the number of online applications for citizens’ certifications by 70% and greatly improved the level of trust between citizens and the public administration.? Similarly, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs increased their automation rate by 65% and reduced average claim processing time by over one third, achieving this in less than four months.?

? Optimizing Financial Management: Process automation can be applied to financial management processes, such as budgeting, expense approvals, and financial reporting. By automating these tasks, agencies can reduce manual effort, minimize errors, improve data accuracy, and enable faster decision-making based on real-time financial insights.??

? Procurement Management: Streamline the entire acquisition process by integrating all its components into a unified system. This comprehensive solution ensures visibility throughout the entire end-to-end process and establishes a complete audit trail for enhanced transparency and accountability.

? Employee Onboarding and Offboarding: Automate the process of onboarding new employees, including paperwork completion, account provisioning, and training enrollment. Similarly, automate the offboarding process to ensure the termination of accounts, access privileges, and the return of assets.

? Coordinating Emergency Response: Process orchestration can be invaluable in coordinating emergency response efforts in the public sector. It can help facilitate seamless communication and collaboration among various agencies and departments involved in emergency response, ensuring a timely and coordinated response to crises such as natural disasters, public health emergencies, or security incidents.

? Enabling Cross-Agency Collaboration: Many public sector initiatives require collaboration across multiple agencies and departments. Process orchestration can facilitate this collaboration by providing a unified platform for managing workflows, data sharing, and decision-making. This ensures smoother coordination and enhances the effectiveness of inter-agency projects and programs.

Getting Things Done?

If your automation domain is particularly complex from bureaucratic or technical perspectives (or both), consider using the strangler pattern.? This is a formal concept from the realm of mainframe computer modernization. It proposes a gradual approach where you systematically replace individual components of legacy functionality with new, modern alternatives. By repeatedly applying this approach, the massive mainframe gradually shrinks in size until it becomes small enough to be replaced entirely in one final decisive action. The beauty of this pattern lies in its adaptability, making it equally effective for tackling end-to-end process automation.? Leveraging this pattern helps avoid failure to launch scenarios driven by trying to transform everything all at once. It is a particularly effective technique in public sector organizations that are tackling serious complexity in their automation projects.?

The automation platform you choose should allow you to embrace this gradual approach, delivering significant and immediate value by automating strategic processes, while still allowing incrementally more value to be added through gradual, piecemeal evolution of the process itself or its underlying process components.? Camunda excels at supporting this approach.? For example, consider driver's license issuance and renewal. This process involves verifying applicant eligibility, collecting necessary documentation, conducting written and road tests, and issuing or renewing driver's licenses upon successful completion. It includes steps such as application processing, identity verification, knowledge testing, driving tests, and photo ID issuance.? Some steps may require integration with legacy systems that lack APIs.? It’s still possible to tackle this complexity and drive business value in the short term by using RPA to automate specific actions that can be orchestrated end-to-end by Camunda.? Later, the underlying systems can be modernized, eliminating the need for an RPA layer and perhaps opening additional opportunities for business value through automation.? Camunda has experience supporting this phased approach to automation and has customer references that are orchestrating hundreds of RPA bots.?

Summary?

Process orchestration represents a tremendous opportunity for public sector organizations to transform their operations and unlock substantial business value. By harnessing automation, they can enhance efficiency, accelerate service delivery, optimize costs, ensure compliance, and elevate citizen experiences. As the public sector landscape continues to evolve, embracing process automation will be instrumental in shaping a future where organizations can thrive in their missions to serve with greater efficiency, transparency, and impact.

If you're interested in learning more about process orchestration or wish to share your experiences in the public sector, feel free to reach out or leave a comment below!??

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