Business Process Orchestration vs. Automation—What's the Difference?

As automation capabilities grow, so do its use cases. It’s not surprising that 80% of executives think automation can be applied to any business decision, according to a Gartner survey. But as implementation becomes easier and automation adoption more prevalent, your organization can quickly lose control, with too many automation projects happening in silos. Having a strategy and the right automation tools can help prevent you from wasting time and effort on one-off automation projects that fail to deliver end-to-end process efficiency.

Business process orchestration can help you regain control of your automation efforts. These two concepts go together like peanut butter and jelly—they combine human and digital workers, systems, and data to energize your processes and help you provide a smooth and rich experience for your users.

In this post, we’ll explore orchestration vs. automation and how each applies to an end-to-end process automation strategy.

Learn how to successfully implement end-to-end process automation strategies. Get the Process Automation Guide.

Business process orchestration is a management approach that connects your workflows, technology, and people. Using a visual, low-code interface, process orchestration allows you to quickly build and manage complex processes. Think of it as the overarching framework that helps you facilitate the handoff between digital workers, human workers, data, and systems.

Automation refers to shifting responsibility for tasks from humans to technology better suited to handle repetitive, time-consuming work. It’s the tactical execution of single tasks by machine workers.

[ Read also: 5 Best Practices for an Automation Center of Excellence. ]

Let’s go back to our PB&J analogy. If process orchestration is the jelly (helping you manage workflows, people, and machines) and automation is the peanut butter (the execution of tasks by machine workers), then combining them into a unified process orchestration and automation platform that combine is the bread that brings the sandwich (your business processes) together.

Combining automation with orchestration helps you optimize  business processes from end to end, enabling you to:

• Connect data with tools like data fabric that unify information across systems and apps. 
• Simplify workflow design with visual proces models that you can build like you would a flow chart.
• Automate your workflows by orchestrating people, technologies, and data in an end-to-end process.
• Improve process performance with the ability to track and analyze key performance indicators and inefficiencies.
• Deliver superior experiences to all of your users, including employees, partners, and customers, with better, faster processes.

Uniting humans, bots, and systems improves speed and agility so you can boost operational efficiency, adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands, and innovate.