Executive POV: Business-as-Code to Codify, Agentify, and Optimize Your Processes

Why should an enterprise that moves atoms in the physical world invest in Business-as-Code to codify their business processses? We believe that any inefficiency or opacity in a business-critical process---from order processing to logistics to internal workflows---bleeds money through idle resources, sluggish customer experiences, or missed opportunities for automation.

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This is the third and final part in a three-part series about our Business-as-Code Approach.

1. Tech POV: Business-as-Code
2. Executive POV: Have Your Claw and Eat it Too With Business-as-Code
3. [This Post] Executive POV: Business-as-Code to Codify, Agentify, and Optimize Processes

/ Many enterprises suffer from such ineffeciencies in critical processes which span SaaS systems, spreadsheets, emails, and legacy software. However, our experience shows that Business-as-Code can flip these problems on their head by codifying workflows with custom software that closely matches and automates business processes:

1. Rather than altering business workflows to match expensive, one-size-fits-few SaaS software, customers enjoy cost-effective software tooling which adapts to their rapidly-changing workflows.
2. End-to-end process observability and tracing allows enterprises to identify and capitalize on opportunities to automate or optimize.
3. Codified business processes allow customers to automate specific steps safely and predictably using AI Agent technology.

Our Business-as-Code approach is our "secret sauce" to unlock these benefits for our customers. Business-as-Code provides software teams (either your own internal IT team, our Business-as-Code Practice team, or both) with a higher-level abstraction for composing workflows on top of microservices, SaaS Towers, and AI Agents. The high-level code closely mirrors the business process, allowing you to create new capabilities or rewire processes much faster than legacy point-to-point integration solutions.

For the CTO's, architects, and developers reading this, our Saddle Command Center enables Business-as-Code by:

• Providing a visual business process representation from your WfSpec code, which is closely aligned to the business.
• Handling durable execution to allow developers to focus on business logic rather than routine reliability and integration challenges.
• Handling long-running async processes and real-time, fast processes alike.
• Journaling every process execution into a central repository of event data.
• Detecting and responding to anomalies in real time with well-governed processes.

tip

For a more technical overview of how the LittleHorse "Business-as-Code" architecture works, I'd recommend checking out my blog from January.

Software: Your New Competitive Edge

I'd like to share a few stories about business improvements that our customers have achieved using LittleHorse. These are some of my favorite use-cases because these companies are not "tech companies" by any stretch; in fact, several of these solutions were delivered to non-technical organizations by our Business-as-Code Practice.

I'd like to make a note that my father learned the hard way (and then got bought by Oracle): it's important to avoid vendor lock-in. Customers tell me that proprietary platforms such as MuleSoft and Camunda are expensive, closed-source, and require highly-specialized developers. In contrast, LittleHorse is open-source, lightweight, and can be used by any developer or coding agent on day 1, giving you the freedom to adopt quickly, the flexibility to customize the software to your needs, and the peace of mind to know that you're not locked in to any one vendor.

Let's take a look at how three companies have used LittleHorse to:

• Discover and fix bottlenecks in business processes.
• Build custom automations not available in out-of-the-box SaaS platforms at a lower cost.
• Responsibly deploy AI Agents to automate critical processes.

Unlocking Optimization & Efficiency

A national landscaping company that we're working with used LittleHorse to prepare their business to overtake their competitors as the largest vegetation management company. Previously, their software stack struggled to keep up with demand to manage a fleet of 100,000 pieces of equipment build custom fleet management software, bid on job orders, fulfill work orders to repair broken equipment, or to manage HR & personnell. Every business process inside this company lived inside some combination of NetSuite, Salesforce, Mobi Work, UKG, or simple email and spreadsheets.

With a small team of software engineers aided by LittleHorse's platform and our Business-as-Code Practice team, this company was able to build a fully custom software platform for fleet management, maintenance, and job fulfillment. Real-time location tracking updates allowed the scheduling team to elastically respond to events such as out-of-order equipment or weather disturbances, reducing equipment idle times and increasing the number of jobs that the company could bid on.

By building a custom software solution on top of LittleHorse, this company was able to more efficiently utilize their resources and win more business.

Custom Automations at Lower Cost

Consultant, accounting, and advisory firm PIF Co provides accounting, tax, and HR services to their customers. PIF Co, though tech-forward, does not have a software engineering team on staff. However, they were able to leverage LittleHorse's Business-as-Code Practice team and the Saddle Command Center to build custom automations for their clients that were not available in out-of-the-box SaaS platforms.

PIF Co has expertise in such platforms as NetSuite, QuickBooks, Microsoft Teams, Google Ads, Rippling, HubSpot, SalesForce, and Oracle. One service they offer to their customers is to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of marketing, sending & collecting invoices, and accounting. These processes span multiple systems and, in many "special" cases for unique customers, required manual steps to get data between different systems.

However, our Business-as-Code Practice team (with help from our partner, El Paso Labs codified these processes using Business-as-Code.

Despite PIF not having an in-house software team, LittleHorse enabled PIF Co to replace several manual processes with automation and AI agents, allowing them to provide better experiences to their clients.

A Responsible AI Strategy

Nearly every conversation we have with our customers--whether speaking with their tech teams or their operations teams--arrives at the question of how to safely use AI Agents to automate complex processes. In the case of one financial services company, predictability and compliance are even more important.

Business-as-Code expedites our customer's process to approve investor communications. In the past, all outgoing communications required human review. However, the customer used the Decision Worker Pattern to allow agents to triage only critical communications for human review.

Thus, another process which was previously manual and email-driven was automated using Business-as-Code (this time, also LLM's), resulting in a more responsive customer experience.

Adopting Business-as-Code

The problems our customers solve with Business-as-Code are hardly unique: almost every enterprise has similar challenges. We've spoken with retailers who incorrectly reject 3% of online orders due to false-positives on fraud; we've seen insurance companies lose business due to sluggish provider onboarding processes; and we've seen companies lose orders due to a sluggish trade compliance process.

Every company needs to codify and automate their critical processes with Business-as-Code. But how to go about this if your company doesn't have a "Netflixian" software team?

Our Business-as-Code Practice

Our most successful customers all came to us with a specific business process which lacked visibility, moved too slowly, failed too often, or was ripe for automation with Agentic AI.

For companies who don't have the engineering bandwidth to build automation on their own, our Business-as-Code Practice provides expertise needed to drive successful project implementations. We start with a 2-4 week Business-as-Code Workshop

If your software systems are holding you back from adopting agentic AI in critical processes, Business-as-Code is the perfect approach help you do so in a responsible and predictable manner.

note

I don't delegate my writing, neither to an LLM nor to a ghost writer. Yes, this blog was written by the same person who wrote about the Saga Pattern and who wrote the original code for the LittleHorse Server!