Workflows,
modelled honestly.
Long-running business processes on Camunda, Temporal and equivalents, with human tasks, timers, retries and idempotency modelled explicitly, so automation survives partial failures.
Workflows fail in the seams between systems. The workflows that survive year three are the ones where the seams, timers, retries, idempotency, human tasks, are engineered as first-class citizens.
Model the process
The workflow is a first-class artefact, versioned, reviewed and tested, not a diagram in a wiki.
We model with BPMN or code depending on audience. Business stakeholders read what we ship; engineers own the execution. The model is the source of truth.
Human tasks, escalations, SLAs and disagreement paths are engineered explicitly, never assumed.
The seams are where workflows fail. So the seams are what we engineer first.
Reliability
Idempotency, retries, timers and compensating actions treated as engineering primitives, not as afterthoughts.
Every step is idempotent by design. Every external call has a retry and a compensating action. Every long-running wait has a timer and an escalation.
Workflows that survive partial failures are the ones designed for them.
Human in the loop
Approvals, reviews and escalations engineered as first-class surfaces, with clear queues, SLAs and ownership.
Where humans belong in the loop, they belong in a well-designed queue with the context they need, not in a modal or an email chain.
Roles, delegation and disagreement paths are engineered against the reality of how your teams work.
Operate
Trajectories, SLAs and business metrics monitored as ongoing engineering, not just at go-live.
Every workflow instance is observable end-to-end. Where a step slows down, where escalations pile up, where SLAs slip, visible in real time.
Recurring failures get engineered out. The workflows that age are the ones operated as products.
Toolkit
Framework, platform and vendor selection is driven by the shape of the work and the team who'll own it, not by whichever ecosystem is loudest this year. The list below is representative, not prescriptive.
- Orchestration
- Camunda · Temporal · Airflow · Step Functions
- Modelling
- BPMN · DMN
- Messaging
- Kafka · RabbitMQ · SQS
- Observability
- OpenTelemetry · Grafana · Datadog
- Runtime
- Node.js · .NET · Java · Python · Go
Selected work
What clients ask us first
01Camunda, Temporal or something else?
Per workload. Camunda for BPMN-modelled human-centric workflows. Temporal for code-first, long-running distributed workflows. Airflow for scheduled data pipelines. Blends are healthy.
02How do you handle idempotency and retries?
By designing every step to be safely repeatable, tracking external calls with correlation IDs, and modelling compensating actions where needed. Retries without idempotency create duplicates; idempotency without retries creates fragility.
03How do you handle human tasks?
As first-class engineering surfaces, queues, SLAs, delegation, escalation, disagreement paths, with context pre-loaded so reviewers can act quickly.
04How do you observe running workflows?
End-to-end tracing on every instance, structured logs on every step, SLA and business-metric dashboards. Recurring failures become backlog items, not tolerated behaviour.
Let's discuss your workflow programme.
Share a brief overview of the workflows you're automating, we'll arrange an introductory conversation with the relevant practice leadership.