Workflow orchestration enables you to link various tasks, systems, applications and teams to ensure processes move in the correct order.
Understanding if your workflows are meeting business goals, reducing delays, reducing errors and utilizing resources well can be done by tracking the right metrics around your workflow orchestration design.
By tracking your metrics regularly, you can identify any bottlenecks in your workflows and improve them.
Why Track Workflow Orchestration Metrics?
Workflow orchestration consists of many interlinked processes. If any of these processes are delayed or fail, it can cause problems with your overall process. If you don't track the right metrics, you may struggle to identify any issues.
Tracking workflow metrics will help you:
- Improve efficiency by identifying any redundant processes and reducing the time taken to complete them.
- Reduce errors by tracking failed tasks, duplicated tasks and disruptions.
- Identify any bottlenecks in your workflow.
- Understand how much you are spending on your operations.
- Improve reliability by tracking successful tasks.
- Make better decisions based on performance.
Top Workflow Metrics
The best metrics to track will depend on your workflow type. However, there are some general metrics that should be tracked.
1.Workflow Completion Rate
This tells you what percentage of your workflows completed successfully. This will let you know if your workflow is completing, or if they often get stuck.
If you have a high completion rate consistently, IT will show your workflows are reliable. If this starts to drop, IT could show there are issues with integration, configuration or tasks failing.
2.Workflow Duration
This tells you how long IT took for your workflow to complete. It can help to identify any slow processes.
For example, if your workflow is to onboard new customers, IT may have several stages such as verifying documents, approval, creating new accounts and confirmation. Tracking the duration will let you know which step is causing delays.
You should track the average workflow duration.
3.Task Failure Rate
This tells you how often tasks are failing. Your workflow may contain several interlinked activities. If one task is failing, IT may stop the next activities from running.
A high failure rate could indicate there are issues with your APIs, data, availability, permissions or dependencies. Tracking this metric will help your technical team identify any recurring issues.
4.Workflow Throughput
This tells you how many workflows/tasks were completed within a certain timeframe. For example, you could track how many customer requests were processed per hour, or how many invoices were approved per day.
The higher your throughput, the more processing power you may have. As long as the quality and reliability is maintained.
You should track this across different timeframes to understand if your workflows are improving.
5.Mean Time To Recover
This tells you how long IT takes on average for your workflow/system to recover from any failures. This is important if your workflow is supporting key business processes.
The lower the recovery time, the quicker your team can identify and fix any disruptions. You can improve this by using automation to alert you, retry tasks, log errors and have clear recovery processes.
6.Workflow Retry Rate
This tells you how often tasks/workflows need to be retried. This can be useful as some network or service issues will be temporary and don't require any manual intervention. However, if you have a high retry rate it could mean there are more underlying issues.
You should track how often tasks are being retried and identify any tasks that keep failing. Too many retries can cause delays and utilize more resources.
7.Resource Utilization
This tells you how well your workflow is utilizing resources. This could include CPU, memory, processing power and manual effort. By tracking this, you will be able to identify any inefficient workflows, over-utilized systems and how you could improve resource allocation.
Workflow Orchestration Design Success Metrics
Whilst tracking technical metrics will tell you how well your orchestration is performing, you should also track some success metrics.
These metrics will help link your workflow performance to your business goals.
1.Reduced Manual Effort
One of the main aims of workflow orchestration is to reduce repetitive tasks and manual processes. You can track how much manual effort your staff are saving by implementing automated workflows.
For example, if your staff used to spend several hours manually routing requests, implementing automated task allocation could greatly reduce this.
2.Cost Savings
This tells you how much money you have saved by improving your workflow efficiency. You can compare how much you were spending on operations pre-implementation. This may include labor, infrastructure, maintenance and fixing errors.
The aim is to save money, however you want to achieve more with the resources you have.
3.Improved SLA Compliance
SLA's (Service Level Agreement) are agreements around what standard of service you expect. Including response times and deadlines. This metric tells you what percentage of your workflows were completed within the SLA.
A high SLA compliance rate shows your processes are performing well. This is important if your workflow is part of IT operations, customer support, financial services etc.
4.Improved Visibility
A good orchestration should make IT easier for your teams to see what is going on with your workflow. You can track if your staff and admins have good visibility of tasks. For example, if tasks are in progress, waiting for approval, failing or completed.
This will help everyone be accountable.
5.Increased Staff Productivity
Workflow orchestration can increase staff productivity by reducing repetitive admin tasks. You can track how much time your staff are spending on manual tasks. How much time they are spending on tasks that require decision making, problem solving and specialist knowledge.
You want your staff to be doing more high value tasks.
6.Customer Satisfaction
If your workflow is customer facing, you should track how well IT is performing. You can track how quickly your requests are being responded to, how many requests are being resolved. Also track any complaints and satisfaction levels.
A fast workflow will not be of much use if the results aren't accurate and satisfactory.
Workflow Orchestration Metrics Comparison
Different metrics will track different aspects of your workflow. Below is a simple comparison.
How To Track And Analyze Your Workflow Performance
1.Set a Baseline
Before implementing or changing your orchestration system, track how your workflows are currently performing. Check: How long they are taking to complete, Failure rate, Costs, Manual effort.
2.Choose The Right Metrics
Not all metrics will be as important for your organization. For example, a data processing company may want to track throughput, duration and task failure rates. Whereas a customer support department may want to track response time, SLA compliance and customer satisfaction.
Choose metrics that are relevant to your operations.
3.Use Monitoring Tools
There are many orchestration platforms and monitoring tools that can help you track your workflow. This can include: How your workflows are performing. Task status, failures and resources.
Dashboards can help your teams to easily see this information and identify any changes.
4.Set Realistic Goals
Once you have chosen the right metrics to track, set realistic goals. For example:
- Keep your workflow completion rate above 95%.
- Reduce your average duration by 15%.
- Improve your SLA compliance.
- Reduce repeated task failures.
- Reduce manual processing hours.
Ensure your goals are realistic and based around your current performance, business needs and opportunities for improvement.
5.Track Regularly
Ensure you are tracking your workflows regularly. Depending on how important your workflows are, you may want to track daily. However, tracking weekly or monthly can help you identify any trends.
6.Improve Using Data
The metrics should help you to improve. If your duration is increasing, look at your tasks to see if there are any dependencies or delays. If your failure rates are increasing, look at your integration and data. If your resource utilization is too high, look at improving your workflow scheduling.
For companies like HeloixIT is important to understand the metrics around your workflow orchestration design. A practical approach would be to understand the purpose of each workflow and track metrics that will show how well they are performing. Tracking metrics such as completion rate, duration, task failure rate and resource utilization will give
you insight into how efficient your workflows are technically.
By regularly reviewing these metrics you can identify areas to improve.
Conclusion
It is important to track your workflow performance to understand if your orchestration systems are performing as expected. Tracking technical metrics such as completion rate, duration, throughput and failure rate will show you how your workflows are performing.
However, tracking business metrics such as cost savings, productivity and SLA compliance will show you how they are impacting your business.
By tracking both types of metrics in an effective way, you can set baselines, choose the right metrics, track regularly and use them to improve. Ultimately you don't want to track the most data, but the data that will show you what is working, where issues are and how to make your workflows more efficient, reliable and valuable.
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