I really enjoy speaking with our customers and prospects and hearing their various perspectives on the state of the workflow market here in 2021. One of the things that continues to stand out to us is that customers don't want to have to deal with the less flexible, heavier-weight workflow or BPM tools, and we believe that aversion is driving the rapid growth in the adoption of both developer-centric and cloud-based "lightweight" workflow tools. For that reason and to give our customers a compelling option in the cloud workflow space, we've decided to partner with Flokzu and to provide services for their Flokzu Cloud BPM product.
One of the things we really like about Flokzu's offering is that you build process applications using the BPMN 2.0 standard. Not only does this mean that you don't have to learn a new, proprietary mechanism for building out your process flows/models; it also means you have the ability to move to another tool in the future if required. Here's an example from our Order to Invoice Demo, which we're going to use in this blog post to show off some of Flokzu's features:
Those of you who have worked with BPMN 2.0 or its derivatives in some of the more popular workflow tools will instantly understand that model, and that's important! If you feel comfortable with how you can build the models, it will be easier to learn the tool and to begin to be more productive.
As you would expect from a cloud-based tool, Flokzu offers a very compelling forms editor as well; here's an example of a portion of a form, again from our Order to Invoice Demo:
The final item we want to mention in this brief overview of Flokzu's capabilities is their reporting; like most of the heavier-weight workflow/BPM suites in the market, they provide the ability to easily build custom reports. Here's an example, and - yes - this is also from our Order to Invoice Demo:
For more on how that application was built, I invite you to watch the live demo that we gave on Flokzu's manufacturing webinar a couple of weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42sz2wfoXUQ.
While there are things that you can't do with Flokzu, such as write Java or .NET code within your apps, here are some examples of compelling things that you can do that make Flokzu low-code versus no-code:
Integrate with your publicly-accessible Web services via REST or SOAP. (The "Check Stock" and "Pick Stock and Ship" steps in our workflow above are actually REST calls to Heroku-hosted Web services!)
Use Zapier (https://zapier.com/) to integrate with web apps. Zapier is a fascinating and very powerful tool for integrating with commonly-recognized web-based services like Google Apps and Dropbox as well as for integrating with enterprise apps such as Salesforce.com. Flokzu's built-in integration with Zapier opens up a world of integration possibilities.
Use JavaScript in your forms to build more intelligent and capable forms.
Use webhooks to send form information from your apps to other systems for further action or for reporting.
For a significant number of customers, Flokzu's feature set will cover all or substantially all of what they need to do, and the integration capabilities discussed above will allow them to fill in any gaps that may exist. And for those customers, the combination of rapid time to market and the capabilities that Flokzu offers will be very compelling.
Of course, we would be remiss if we didn't note that an equally significant number of other customers will need the additional flexibility of the also lightweight but developer-centric tools such as Flowable and Camunda Platform. They serve very different needs and very different customers, and we believe there is plenty of space in the market for both the lightweight, cloud-based workflow tools and the developer-centric workflow tools to flourish.
If you're interested in speaking with us in more detail about Flokzu Cloud BPM or how it compares to developer-centric solutions such as Flowable or Camunda Platform, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at info@summit58.co. We'd love to speak with you and help you make the right choice for your business!
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