An automation platform is a gateway to business strategy excellence

Most businesses turn to automation to improve operational efficiency, and rightly so. But an actual automation platform does more than just speeding things up. Understanding how your processes work at a granular level opens a window on exactly how to optimize your business and informs strategic decisions like nothing else. 

While organizations are constantly under pressure to move faster, reduce costs, and adapt to continuous change, investing in tools that promise quick to see wins don’t have the capacity to solve deeper issues. Real transformation comes from seeing the bigger picture as one. 

A powerful automation platform can help organizations uncover hidden inefficiencies, standardize processes, and focus resources where they matter most. And automation, when applied strategically, becomes more than a tool. It becomes the foundation for seriously informed business decisions. 

Illuminating how your business works with an orchestration lens 

Every company runs on processes, some documented, others — oftentimes a lot, lot, more — randomly happening in fragmented systems or disconnected and ad-hoc ways. Which equals additional workflows built on detours.

Without visibility across the entire business process landscape, it’s difficult to know where delays occur, why costs escalate, or even where teams spend time on repetitive work. And without concrete understanding it's very difficult to apply the right optimization.

On the other hand, when you can see how everything is working, data informed resource allocation, strategic investment decisions, and the development of competitive advantages become confident aspects of operational and business strategy.

Platforms like Flowable provide that visibility. They orchestrate systems, data, and people to create and manage unified, end-to-end processes. Instead of trying to operate across dozens of tools and optimizing isolated points in a workflow here and there, you see the big picture and can take decisions that make the biggest impact.

Flowable enables process mining, for example, which is like an automated CT scan of how your business is running. It does this by leveraging event logs from the systems on which your processes are being carried out. And by capturing and analyzing the digital footprints left by systems and users, to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of process execution, deviations, and performance metrics.

This orchestration helps leadership understand how different departments interact, where handoffs fail, and which bottlenecks impact areas such as customer experience or revenue. With this level of insight, you can prioritize improvements based on real impact, not guesswork or assumptions.

At the same time orchestration supports business agility, as orchestrated processes can be updated, reused, or scaled with far less disruption than traditional workflows. And this flexibility allows organizations to respond at speed without losing any control. 

Identifying and optimizing your ‘shadow processes’  

Even in well-run organizations, a significant amount of work happens outside official systems, and many best methods and how to’s haven’t been explicitly thought out, mapped out, or optimized in any way. Teams create workarounds and regularly duplicate tasks across departments. These are shadow processes: informal workflows that often go unnoticed but consume time and increase risk.

Shadow processes emerge for many reasons. Sometimes, systems don’t support exceptions, or processes are too rigid. Over time, these workaround steps become part of daily operations, adding unnecessary complexity and reducing consistency.

Automation exposes these issues. By analyzing ongoing workflows and monitoring execution it reveals any steps that slow things down or fall outside compliance standards. With issues uncovered, process can be redesigned, and automation can happen quickly and effectively as a whole.

Bringing shadow processes under control doesn’t just improve their execution. It strengthens your ability to respond to business change, ensures regulatory compliance, and reduces operational risk. 

From compliance to competitive edge: the Bank Julius Baer example 

Wealth management firm Julius Baer began with a challenge familiar to many enterprises: an automation landscape built on multiple tools, siloed ownership, and low visibility of inconsistent processes. By integrating end-to-end automation, its shared services department was able to identify process details in depth which in turn drove a novel business strategy to extend the development of automating additional workflows to teams outside of IT.

Fragmentation made optimization difficult to scale, costly to maintain, and slow to adapt. So the firm made the decision to consolidate onto a single platform with Flowable to build a foundation to support strategic automation growth across the business. The first step was integrating critical systems like CRM and access management. Then, rather than chasing fast wins, they focused on proving the platform’s ability to handle high-value, high-risk processes. Which began by tackling one of its most complex workflows: client compliance reviews.

Julius Baer shifted automation from a purely IT-driven effort to a shared capability by enabling business analysts and domain experts to be citizen developers. Over time, this group expanded from 700 to over 1,400 users, expanding development capacity and allowing smaller, department-level workflows to be uncovered and move forward without waiting in long IT queues.

The next step focused on putting the right governance model in place to ensure quality and consistency while giving teams the flexibility to innovate. As Simon Wyss, Head of Global Shared Services, put it: “Governance doesn’t mean restriction. It means enabling people with the right guardrails. That’s what makes it scalable.” If you'd like to find out how Wyss was able to get leadership onboard for such an expansive automation project, tune into our discussion webinar where we cover just that: Winning leadership buy-in for your automation program.

The result was not just an operational improvement but a structural advantage. Flowable enabled Julius Baer to move faster, adapt processes more easily, and support their business transformation from where it was known to matter most. 

Automation as a strategic asset 

When automation is framed as a long-term investment rather than a tactical fix, its value shifts exponentially. It becomes a platform for insight, helping leaders understand the processes that drive results and those that hold the business back. Automation creates a feedback loop between execution and strategy, where each informs the other, making it easier to standardize what works well.

Automation done well enables continuous improvement across the entire business. 

The results of unlocking visibility, control, and directed growth 

Automation software is more than a way to streamline tasks. It’s a way to understand your business, improve its operations, and prepare for what’s next. With orchestration, governance, and a clear view of operations, companies can move faster, adapt more easily, and focus on what drives real results.

Julius Baer is a classic example. They didn’t just digitize workflows but redefined how automation supports strategy. And with that in place, they stand ready to benefit from automation as a core capability designed for growth, not just speed.