10 Best Practices for Effective Business Process Orchestration

Aligning engineering workflows with business processes often feels like navigating uncharted space. Teams speak different languages: business teams focus on outcomes and efficiencies, while engineers care about systems and scalability. Without bridging the gap between business and technology, teams may find it impossible to build processes that actually work.

This guide will take you through 10 best practices for building systems that seamlessly address both business objectives and engineering requirements. Whether you’re taming chaos or optimizing processes, you’ll come away with actionable insights to keep your business processes smooth and efficient.

What is business process orchestration?

Business process orchestration refers to coordinating and automating multiple systems, workflows, and tasks to ensure the seamless execution of a business process. It ensures that software, data, and teams work together efficiently to achieve an objective with minimal manual intervention.

Some examples of business processes include:

• Software deployment and updates
• Invoice processing
• Lead generation and tracking
• Inventory management
• Employee onboarding
• Customer support ticketing and escalation

Business process orchestration is often carried out using Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT) software. This group of software ranges from low-code robotic process automation (RPA) tools to unified platforms for agentic workflow automation, like Orkes Conductor. Let’s dive into some best practices for orchestrating business processes from end to end.

Best practices for orchestrating business processes

Here are the best practices for designing and implementing automated business processes from start to finish:

1. Understand the business context: start with the big picture

Before embarking on system design, take time to understand the requirements. What challenges does the business face? What inefficiencies need to be eliminated?

Think of yourself as an explorer mapping the terrain before setting sail—talk to stakeholders, observe and document processes, and identify goals. Use diagramming tools like Miro, Mermaid, or Visio to help chart out the information you have gathered.

For example, an automated inventory tracking system may involve stock-taking from both physical and digital stores, as well as the occasional event or pop-up. To ensure real-time responsivity and accuracy, you must integrate the various data sources and coordinate across other processes like returns and exchanges. Such deep contextual understanding ensures your solution is meaningful and impactful.

2. Collaborate with all stakeholders early

No traveler will go far alone. Successful process-based system design thrives on collaboration between developers, business analysts, and operations teams. Discussions bring together all the right expertise and prevent misunderstandings.

The collaborative effort doesn’t stop at just talk. The right orchestration platform unlocks synergistic work, where teams from different backgrounds can design the processes on a unified platform. It is important to choose tools that not only empower developers to do their work without friction but also enable business analysts to visualize and understand the process at a higher level.

3. Keep diagrams simple: clarity over complexity

Overly complex diagrams are like convoluted roadmaps; they confuse rather than clarify. Simplicity is key—use clear, concise naming conventions and chunk huge processes into smaller, manageable workflows.

Orchestration platforms like Orkes Conductor display workflows in clear visual diagrams, allowing you to plan and manage processes and track ongoing executions.

Your diagrams serve as a map: they should show the components and guide your teams, not leave them lost.

4. Design for reusability: build modular components

Designing your system with modularity in mind allows for greater flexibility and scalability. Like LEGO bricks, building modular components promotes reuse and adaption.

For example, a company's expense approval and employee onboarding processes could involve the same notification flow. Rather than building the same functionalities twice, you can chunk out the notification steps as a separate component and reuse it as a sub-workflow in both processes.

This approach reduces redundancy, accelerates development, and simplifies future updates.

5. Automate where possible

Automation is your secret weapon for efficiency. Identify repetitive, manual tasks within your workflows and automate them with software, logical flows, and AI agents. Trigger processes based on signals, events, or webhooks wherever possible. Schedule cron jobs for processes that need to be run consistently.

Automation reduces errors, speeds up processes, and frees up human resources for more strategic work. An orchestration platform like Orkes Conductor enables you to build automated flows without having to rely on other platforms for scheduling cron jobs, creating AI-powered tasks, or using other automation strategies.

6. Design for humans in the loop

In an ideal world, every step in the process can be automated. But even the most standard processes will eventually encounter exceptions that involve human judgment.

Design workflows that allow for human intervention or escalation where necessary. Use approval mechanisms and forms to facilitate decision-making. Integrate with collaboration tools like Slack or email. The right business process orchestration tool will make it seamless to design both automation and human involvement into a single process.

7. Plan for scalability and flexibility

As businesses evolve, so will your processes. The right orchestration tool allows you to build flexibly to accommodate future changes with minimal disruption. Look out for tools where you can safely make changes to your processes without affecting existing runs and even upgrade running executions to a new version.

In the same vein, make sure your processes run on a scalable execution engine. This ensures that when demand grows, your system can handle it effortlessly. Plan for the long haul, not just today's traffic. For example, Orkes Conductor can easily scale to handle thousands of large, complex workflows every second with minimal latency.

8. Embed compliance and governance

Regulatory compliance is non-negotiable. Whether it's GDPR, HIPAA, or other industry-specific standards, embedding governance checks ensures that your system remains compliant with legal requirements.

When using an orchestration engine to execute your business processes, ensure it will keep your data secure and confidential, along with strong role-based access controls (RBAC). Orkes Conductor is SOC2 Type 2-compliant and comes equipped with fine-grained RBAC features to control which teams can access what resources.

9. Prioritize error handling and monitoring

Errors happen! But well-prepared systems can handle them gracefully. Incorporate robust mechanisms like retries and compensation flows to automatically handle transient errors. Leverage monitoring tools to detect other unhandled issues in real time.

Using an orchestration engine like Orkes Conductor makes it seamless to incorporate such failure-handling mechanisms without needing to spend time coding for them. Proactive error management is like having a reliable co-pilot—ready to take action when things go off course.

10. Track performance with metrics

A system is only as good as its performance. Define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of your business processes. Common KPIs like cycle time, throughput, and success rate provide insight into their efficacy. Regular reviews help identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement, ensuring the system remains optimized for business objectives.

Orkes Conductor provides a metrics dashboard out of the box, with options to set up alerts so you never miss out when KPIs are not being met.

Using the right execution engine

Let the engine do the work. The right execution engine makes it easier to implement these best practices.

Legacy BPMN systems often struggle to meet the demands of modern enterprises. While the graphical notation is useful for business analysts, many legacy BPMN systems lack developer-friendly features like SDKs, APIs, and observability and debugging support, making it difficult to implement the business processes after designing them. These systems also don’t integrate well with modern development infrastructure, like cloud-nativity, CI/CD pipelines, event streaming systems, and AI toolstacks. These challenges add to rather than alleviate the pain of developing business processes that evolve and scale.

Orkes Conductor is an enterprise-grade Unified Application Platform for process automation, API and microservices orchestration, agentic workflows, systems integration, and efficient task execution. Think of it as the powerful engine supercharging your business processes. Here are some key features that unlock the best practices for orchestrating business processes:

• Highly scalable on any cloud network
• Robust RBAC and visual diagram editor
• Code with SDKs and APIs
• Modular tasks and subworkflows
• Version control
• Dynamic workflow capabilities and AI features
• Human-in-the-loop features
• Metrics and observability dashboard

Summary

By following these best practices, you’ll design systems that are collaborative, scalable, and ready for whatever the market throws at you.

And while this guide covers the essentials, it’s just the beginning of your journey. In an upcoming blog post, we’ll explore how to connect engineering and business to build automation-driven processes that scale with your company’s needs. Stay tuned!

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Conductor is an enterprise-grade Unified Application Platform for process automation, API and microservices orchestration, agentic workflows, and more. Try it out using our online Developer Edition sandbox, or get a demo of Orkes Cloud, a fully managed and hosted Conductor service that can scale seamlessly to meet all enterprise needs.