With more and more housing providers adopting technologies and processes such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA) and business process management (BPM), just waiting in the wings is process orchestration (a.k.a. event orchestration).
At present, most housing providers’ automations are limited to a task level (tactical), whereas orchestration is the automation of linked tasks (strategic), particularly cross-application and cross-department.
Process orchestration can be thought of as the conductor, bringing together the different strengths and attributes of the workflows and processes within housing providers’ existing automation tools, and then coordinating and streamlining them by automating tasks, workflows and decision-making processes across multiple business systems and departments.
In a housing context, process orchestration is an important step towards straight-through processing (STP) whereby, say, a tenant reporting a broken boiler or outbreak of mould automatically sets in motion an orchestrated series of inter-connected automations, starting with the automatic scheduling of the remediation all the way through to finance and asset/housing reporting.
Most housing providers have already automated (to varying degrees) workflows and processes within discrete areas of their operations using tools such as job schedulers, AI, custom scripting, RPA and BPM.
However, the difficult part is then joining together the disparate systems from each of those discrete areas in order to allow the seamless flow of a complete process from start to finish without the need for human inputs.
This is where process orchestration comes in. Orchestration tools have universal connectors, direct integrations and/or API adapters, making system integrations easier (a big advantage over vendor-specific automation tools).
Importantly, most orchestration tools use low/no-code drag-and-drop workflow designers to integrate different tools and technologies, giving housing providers a centralised view of their entire processes without the need to drill-down into the underlying system-specific automations.
We expect process orchestration to become an important part of most housing providers’ technology infrastructure within the next 12-24 months; please email news@housing-technology.com to tell us what you think or if you’re already investigating orchestration.
