Rindap in action: A case for business process automation

Examples are great to make things clear. Here is an extremely simple example to better illustrate Rindap’s concept of business process automation.

Imagine Green Salad, a restaurant trying to manage its orders. Green Salad gets its orders to the restaurant’s order management software. Shift Manager then finds a free delivery employee to dispatch the order once it is ready. This can be time-consuming and the success solely depends on the Shift Manager’s abilities. However, a business process automation can make things much easier.

Instead Rindap’s RESTful API can automate this workflow.

A workflow which starts with an entry of a new order to restaurant’s order management software (a task) can be created on Rindap platform by setting filters to allocate to the delivery employee based on the order’s details (attributes such as ordered food, total price, delivery address, neighbourhood, delivery time etc.) Filters can direct the order to the available delivery employee by matching the orders’ details with set conditions.

For example; let’s assume only Frank, John and Karen deliver the ready orders for Yellow Hill neighbourhood. For the orders to White Valley neighbourhood, Susan and Jack only do the deliveries. So we can create a workflow according to this scenario by using logic-based filters.

The management of countless tasks

If the Yellow Hill is in the details, either Frank, John or Karen should go for the delivery. But how?

Once the order details are entered to the order management software and the order is ready for delivery (a task triggered by Green Salad’s software), the restaurant’s server on which the software operates sends a call to Rindap’s API. Let’s assume each delivery employees’ availability is tracked by their PDAs. Rindap would also be aware of available delivery employees as the restaurant’s server sends API calls to Rindap about the delivery employee’s availability (worker’s status). Let’s also consider that there is a five minute period for the delivery to be assigned to the employee on the PDA. Otherwise, the assignment must be channelled to another employee (task reservation timeout).

Rindap works this information in the designated workflow, then matches the task to the available delivery employee. Later it sends a response to Green Salad’s server. From the server, the data can go to the matched delivery employee’s PDA (worker).

In this case, if Karen is off or John is out of reach for more than five minutes, then Frank will have the assignment.

Numerous benefits in every case

Even in this short and simple scenario, the Shift Manager survived a hectic workload of delivery management. Green Salad avoided delivery problems. Green Salad team managed to automate the entire order delivery allocation process. Now it is possible to evaluate the delivery staff’s performance according to data.

Besides you can realise that there is no need for an integration between the restaurant’s order management software and PDAs. There is also no necessity to write down lots of code to detect the available worker.

Now consider if Green Salad operates in thousands of cities around the world with thousands of delivery employees and the following requirements must be on the table as well. The delivery employees should get the orders according to numerous variables instead of just the neighbourhood. The delivery employees should also get a maximum of 5 deliveries per hour (rate limit). Besides, the deliveries must leave according to the customers’ selection of the delivery time (delay). Rindap can enable all of these conditions.

Pushing the boundaries of efficiency further

Let’s step up our imagination. Consider a case when a customer should be notified by SMS, email, telephone. The automation process of ordering Green Salad’s ingredients based on the number of orders received. Consider the automation of order preparation for the process of order delivery. Even data from the IoT sensors in smart kitchen appliances can take place in the same workflow.

There will be no need for an integration to manage all of these processes in the same platform. Rindap’s business process automation ability moves beyond data silos and devices.

Another important benefit of Rindap helps you to manage your asynchronous activities and the sequential activities in the same workflow. Imagine now the order delivery case of Green Salad restaurant also involves the ingredients inventory management.

Consider once a new order is in, the workflow on Rindap’s platform requires a check of ingredient inventory. Rindap assigns the task to inventory software (worker) and retrieves the information back to the workflow if the necessary amount of ingredients are available. If there is a sufficient amount of ingredients the process continues with the order delivery, if not it continues with placing a purchase order for the necessary ingredients (worker). Rindap can convey the data necessary to the restaurant’s server to place a purchase order. (i.e a worker to online order to Green Salad’s ingredient supplier). Once the missing ingredients are back on the restaurant’s inventory software, the process of order delivery may continue.

Unleash the potential

As you can see from this example Rindap offers great potential in automation and business process management. It manages asynchronous activities (order delivery and inventory management) while proceeding with the delivery tasks for the orders with necessary ingredients in the same workflow. Developers can sequence the workflow into steps by setting logic-based filters one after another as subsequent decision points. The workers’ responses update the tasks. Also, there is no need for any system integration as Rindap conveys all the data and business decisions of the workflow.

If Rindap was not used in this case, developers would need to integrate inventory software, order management software, order placement application and so on which would cause a great burden on maintenance, huge performance drawbacks, cost a lot of resource including time and of course a significant risk of failure. End-users did not need to learn a new software interface either, as Rindap lets the workflow continue automatically as the legacy systems keep operating on their terms.

Rindap offers business analysts and developers a formidable tool and a smarter alternative that easily lets them recreate and orchestrate their business cases in terms of workflows.