For decades, many companies, especially in financial services, have relied on tools like BPMN and legacy orchestration frameworks to manage complex workflows. Even though these tools were once seen as the best option, using them now will only slow progress in industries that require more agility and innovation than ever.
The familiarity of these tools makes them the comfortable, go-to option, but this comfort will cost you, as these tools no longer meet the demands of today’s consumer. This is where a forward-thinking solution becomes vital.
In this post, we'll discuss the downsides of legacy orchestration tooling, share examples from real companies, and give you advice to help your team improve development efficiency.
The Limitations of BPMN and Legacy Orchestration Tooling
There are a variety of limitations to BPMN and legacy orchestration frameworks. Two of the most common limitations are that the tools struggle to scale and slow down development.
Struggling to Scale
Many modern systems are too complex and large-scale for legacy tools to handle. As applications and workloads continue to grow, these tools become more of a bottleneck than an aid.
Legacy tools often rely on visual representations that can become difficult to manage as workflows grow in complexity. Additionally, their architecture was not built to handle high throughput. This makes it challenging for them to adapt to your business needs that are ever growing and changing and hard to integrate with modern systems.
For example, think about managing growing transaction volumes or introducing new services to your system. Legacy tools struggle to handle these demands, which forces your engineering team to create workarounds that only waste time and potentially increase technical debt.
Slow Development
Besides these scalability issues, legacy tools introduce inefficiencies that are often overlooked. Many legacy orchestration tools require proprietary domain-specific languages (DSLs) or inflexible languages like XML, JSON, or YAML to define them. This makes it difficult for developers to implement changes, debug workflows, and maintain workflows.
For developers, this translates to spending more time doing tiring tasks like managing brittle, inflexible workflows and less time delivering features that add value. The result? Missed deadlines, frustrated teams, and systems that cannot keep pace with industry standards.
What to Look for in a New Tool
As a company seeking to modernize, you need tools that can scale effortlessly, integrate easily, and take the tedious tasks off of your plate so that your developers can innovate. When evaluating a new tool, make sure that it can provide you with the following benefits:
Scalability
The right tool gives developers the ability to design and manage processes with clarity and control. Your solution should be a system that centers your code and enables your team to work directly in their preferred programming languages, eliminating rigid templates and opaque configurations.
This transparency not only simplifies debugging but also allows teams to tailor workflows to your specific business needs, resulting in faster and more informed decision-making.
Reliability
Reliability is at the foundation of any stable system. The right solution ensures that critical processes (in financial services, these include payments, transfers, and data reconciliation) recover seamlessly from interruptions.
Additionally, built-in capabilities like automated retries and state persistence keep workflows running smoothly, reducing the risk of costly downtime and protecting both your revenue and your reputation.
A Code-First Approach
Developers thrive when they can focus on innovation instead of repetitive, manual tasks. By abstracting away the complexities of error handling and orchestration, a modern tool reduces overhead and streamlines workflow creation. This efficiency allows engineering teams to deliver new features faster, while fostering a more rewarding development environment.
Benefits like this are what Temporal’s product is based on. Our approach is one that allows our customers to overcome the problems they faced with legacy tools and achieve new heights.
How One Bank Achieved 8x Faster Project Delivery with Temporal
ANZ Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in Australia and New Zealand, faced significant challenges while building their app, ANZ Plus. The team spent over 18 months struggling with the complexities of re-architecting legacy systems using their existing legacy orchestration tool. It wasn’t until they adopted Temporal that progress sped up dramatically.
Within six weeks, ANZ had their app in production — an 8x improvement in project delivery speed. Temporal allowed the team to simplify their workflows by:
- Abstracting error-handling and state management, allowing developers to focus on business logic.
- Integrating seamlessly with third-party APIs like Salesforce, preventing timeouts and ensuring smooth processes.
- Providing the resilience needed to deliver a reliable, customer-friendly experience. Writing workflows in Golang, the same language as their application.
As ANZ put it, “Over the course of a single weekend, we achieved with Temporal what had eluded us for an entire year.”
In Conclusion
Expectations for reliability and scalability are only going to continue to increase, so organizations are being forced to choose an alternative path to adapt. It’s critical to ensure that your path only leads you to more success and future stability.
With Temporal, engineering teams gain a modern, scalable platform that empowers developers, enhances reliability, and supports innovation. It’s not just about managing workflows — it’s about creating a foundation for the future.
If you’re ready to take your next step, start by downloading our white paper. It explores everything you need to know to reduce risk and increase reliability with a modern, code-first workflow tool.