Business Automation Software Solutions: Jira + Slack + Camunda + Microservices

Why business automation solutions are so important? Take a look at three facts from McKinsey:

• It’s possible to automate almost 45% of the most typical work activities, such as processing sales of transactions or providing information about product services;
• 60% of all businesses can save up to 30% of their time using automation. Typical processes for automation concern large document processing, typical contract generation;
• 20% of the tasks performed by sales specialists can be automated. 

Operational Workflow Case Study by Softengi

As you may have noticed, operational process automation is the basis of a successful organization in our time. Adequate automation can reduce the enormous amount of time wasted on repetitive manual tasks. Softengi sees digital transformation as its core philosophy, that is why we aim to digitize our own processes and operations first of all.

We’ve realized that our delivery directors who manage huge teams spend at least 10-18 hours before the end of the month calculating the monthly performance of their teams in Jira. Reports generation and performance analysis steal the time that could be otherwise spent on communication with the team or the tasks that require creativity from managers. 

Trying to solve this issue for our team, we created a tool that combines Jira and Slack with the help of Camunda BPM that automates report generation and makes it accessible via easy-to-use and comfortable messengers. 

The solution is a cloud service that allows automating time logging and control over a team performance in Jira with the help of BPMN processes provided by Camunda with the further interaction of the whole team via messengers (Slack, Telegram, E-mail, or any other service.) 

Results

The results turned out to be very promising. Here is what we’ve got:

1) Automated reports on the deviations in work overflow. The goal is to send notifications to the management and regular employees regarding any deviations from the established. In a nutshell, a manager will receive regular notifications in Messenger (Slack, Facebook, Telegram) on any deviations from the goals on human hours. The benefit is that the manager won’t need to analyze each report in search of deviations and violations of norms in his team workload.

2) Managers’ reports for a certain period (once a month or week) regarding a particular team with the possibility to make a detailed report on particular team members/projects ( similar to a pivot table). 

3) Team members report on their workload within some periods with the possibility of making detailed reports. 

Automated Notifications for Microservices

Microservices architecture is a new development style that is gaining popularity in the IT world thanks to a number of indisputable benefits. Fault isolation is easy, setup time is faster, data is federated, and there are no cross-dependencies between codebases. 

More and more businesses are choosing microservices architecture for web development. Yet even microservices have their negative sides. Monitoring microservices gets difficult as they can belong to different departments and can be written in various programming languages.

There are cases when connecting and automating the work of microservices is crucial. For instance, a microservice responsible for the release of the goods should be connected to the microservices responsible for the payments. In other words, the first should not be activated unless the first has performed the action that was required. In case the payment has not been performed yet and the goods were not released, the client needs to return the payment.

To arrange this action automatically, we need to create an orchestration tool that would accumulate all this information and act according to the general higher logic of effective client services. In this case, Camunda becomes an orchestration tool that holds the knowledge about all the microservices and generates logical actions in case of faults of certain microservices. 

In case the microservice responsible for the payment notifies the admin that the payment is not received, the release of goods microservice does not perform the action. This is a more detailed scheme of automation for those who want to know the details.

This is just one of the examples of automation for microservices. The very same principle can be extrapolated from the enormous amount of tasks and operations created with the help of microservices, which are gaining a deserved popularity among developers and clients. 

The ultimate goal is to synchronize the work of all microservices and make a notification process about any failure automatic. 

Which Processes Can Be Automated?

If you are thinking about business process automation, here are the criteria that might guide you in making a final decision.

• The process requires consistency across the organization;
• The process is repeatable;
• The process needs to be free from error.

You need people to manage teams, make creative decisions, and communicate. Machines are not able to do that. With business automation solutions, you will leave precious time to your employees.