Processes run products. Every enterprise organization that creates products (and of course services too, many of which these days we refer to as productized entities) that depend upon a core business process structure to govern their shape, form and effectiveness. Whether it's North Sea oil and gas services or cupcakes, the business behind these products needs to have an established process structure driven by logic, governed by business rules & process algorithms and now increasingly fuelled by automation accelerators.

Aiming to make process orchestration a more out-of-the-box experience so that it is more automated and productized in and of itself is Camunda, a company known for its workflow engine that allows users to orchestrate tasks in a process. Not actually named after some lost East African tribe (as it may sound), the name Camunda in fact comes from the Latin verbs capere (to capture) and munda (clean).

The company has is now aiming to eradicate automation silos with the addition of Camunda robotic process automation and Camunda IDP (Intelligent Document Processing) alongside new AI features organizations to build and scale automations with process orchestration.

"Our new AI and automation capabilities are an important step in Camunda's evolution to become the [a] process orchestration and automation platform," commented Jakob Freund, CEO and co-founder, Camunda. "As organizations of all sizes and industries adopt AI and automate at scale, they must integrate all of their components in a coherent, orchestrated fashion in order to truly realize value from their investments, or simply to remain competitive. We are committed to helping companies to automate better business with a flexible, composable platform for end-to-end process orchestration and automation."

Freund reminds us that many firms have implemented what he (politely but disparagingly) calls "task-oriented point solutions" i.e. more singular inherently less networked or integrated products that appear to be (and indeed may be) effective at defined specific tasks, but that ultimately often suffer from lack of unified management in what is now our cloud-connected world of interwoven enterprise technology.

This reality, he says, creates a chaotic, siloed landscape.

"This [chaos] prevents organizations from gaining full value from automation, limiting their ability to be efficient and adapt to changes quickly. Camunda continues to be laser-focused on end-to-end process orchestration and the new automation capabilities will give customers the flexibility to build a comprehensive, composable architecture for their specific automation needs - be it a best-of-breed, blended, or fully Camunda-powered end-to-end automation solution," noted Freund and team.

Camunda robotic process automation works to coalesce isolated task automation into end-to-end process orchestration by embedding RPA directly into a workflow. The company offers a composable architecture (meaning that it can be adopted in stages to make scaling easier... and that it doesn't all have to be consumed or adopted at once) that integrates with existing and newly developed "bots" (i.e software bot automation services from chatbots to other worker-bots designed to handle internal application and data processes) all within the same platform.

"An advantage of our composable architecture is that enterprises can operationalize AI in an easy way to leverage its potential and promises," said Daniel Meyer, CTO, Camunda. "AI agents are already fulfilling tasks within automated processes. Process orchestration enables seamless integration, management, and monitoring of AI capabilities. In the near future, agentic AI systems, operating as autonomous systems, pursuing more complex goals with limited or no human intervention, will be part of end-to-end automation as well, and will be implemented in a similar way as AI agents are today."

The company's approach to intelligent document processing (a technology function built to handle manual data entry, extraction, analysis and - to some degree- document management so that humans can stand aside) see it provide engineering that replicate human work using AI and ML to classify, extract and process information from documents. This helps minimize errors and saves time.

Also part of its latest service updates it a Camunda SAP integration. This is designed to Simplify SAP transformations (by which the company really means deployments, migrations or installations) with process orchestration based upon an open and composable architecture with enough flexibility to integrate both SAP and non-SAP systems.

"Organizations can seamlessly orchestrate SAP across people, systems, and devices, enabling them to increase agility, accelerate development, and reduce SAP S/4HANA migration risk," notes Camunda, in a press statement. "Camunda Co-pilot [works to] boost IT and business user productivity with a common modeling language supported by Camunda Modeler's new AI-powered Co-pilot and assistants. With Modeler suggestions, organizations can unlock faster and more efficient end-to-end process modeling."

Moving forward in the sector of the information technology market, we will inevitably continue to inject our document management layer with new degrees of intelligence.

Now that interacting with a web browser on a desktop machine or smartphone sees users offered support from co-pilot functions supplying generative AI and bot-based automation to help us get things done faster, the next stage sees us elevate towards so-called intelligent execution, a slightly indistinct practice at the moment which appears to straddle microprocessor management onward to productized decision making from machines on our behalf.

Either way, the lone musician in the business orchestra is being brought back into tune.