There are wonderful ecommerce platforms on the market that allow anyone to set up an online business in a few steps. When you’re running your online business using ready-made tools like Woocommerce or Shopify, you get a good package that will serve you to an extent.
When your business is becoming more and more digital, a webshop is not simply an isolated component – it must be integrated with your business as a whole. That means integrating third-party services and potentially building some custom software on top of the ready-made platform to tie the ecommerce solution to your wider business. Especially if your product or service is complex, or if you’re charging e.g. pay-by-use, the ready-made solution is rarely enough to begin with.
When systems start to slow you down
Having an ecommerce solution and several systems outside of it, you may find yourself with new and persisting challenges.
- Despite having digital solutions in place, do you still have to do a lot of manual work? Will this become a bottleneck when you want to scale your business?
- Is customising the existing system to meet business demands becoming cumbersome?
- Is the system becoming sensitive to errors? Does the whole system collapse when one part stops working?
- Do you feel like you have to adapt your business processes to suit your IT systems?
- Do you feel like the business process gets lost between different services and applications, and you’re losing sight of the big picture?
“Is the only solution building a new system?
Luckily, no.”
Due to the increasing complexity, building new services and solutions become large development projects. Error handling becomes increasingly difficult, and the business process gets lost in the code. Is the only solution building a new system? Luckily, no.
To deal with challenges like these, leading ecommerce companies like Zalando have turned to the process-driven approach. Process-driven development is a means to better align IT systems with business processes in such a way that the business processes are the leading variable that IT systems must serve, not the other way around. It’s especially useful when you have an infrastructure combined from multiple systems and applications.
How modelling your processes can help
Employing the process-driven approach has many benefits that address the challenges described above.
- You can keep the control of processes while implementing features with third party or custom solutions.
- Processes are developed and tracked in real-time with intuitive visual language that is easy to understand and validate.
- You can find bottlenecks, react to errors and recover quickly.
- Processes can combine manual and automated tasks and you can develop them iteratively automating tasks when you have time and resources to do that.
In the process-driven approach, we’re working from the business processes and developing systems to serve the business processes. Process modelling works as the “spine”, keeping the process visible at all times.
We do this using Camunda Workflow Automation Platform. We find that it’s particularly well suited to ecommerce. The mature and widely-used platform includes plenty of ready-made tools. It’s versatile and can be integrated with different technologies. The open-source technology is easy to take into use, and you can use their free version to validate if it’s the fitting solution to your business.
Using the process-driven approach doesn’t limit what systems you can use as part of your architecture, on the contrary. We can integrate ready-made, best-of-the-breed services or any custom business logic while keeping the business processes as the guiding factor.
If these are questions that you’re currently challenged with, don’t hesitate to get in touch for a chat on how the process-driven approach could help. We’d also love to hear your thoughts on Camunda. Try it out on their website.
Aleksi is a full stack developer and software architect with 12+ years of experience working with both public and private sectors, telco, ecommerce and culture. What drives Aleksi is the desire to create technological solutions that enable better and easier life for people.
