The Total Economic Impact™ Of Orkes Conductor

Revenue Protection

Evidence and data. A recurring theme across the interviews was that Orkes Conductor helped protect revenue by improving the reliability and automation of customer-facing use cases where failed, delayed, or abandoned interactions could directly affect transaction completion, customer experience, or revenue capture. The interviewees said that prior to adopting the platform, their organizations were constrained by fragmented process orchestration environments, limited visibility into failed task executions, manual exception handling, and brittle retry or recovery logic that impeded the ability to consistently complete customer-facing workflows. When customer-facing task executions failed or stalled, teams often had to manually identify the failure point, determine whether and where to restart the workflow, and remediate the issue without creating duplicate transactions, delayed decisions, or customer disruption.

Interviewees said Orkes Conductor provides stateful execution, targeted retries, failure workflows, step-level visibility, and more automated exception handling for customer-facing use cases, which enabled their organizations to reduce the share of customer-facing task executions that resulted in failed, delayed, or abandoned interactions.

• The senior payments manager for the financial services organization explained: “A production support person would have to go into each and every log file and try to find out where that payment had failed. It would take 30 or 35 minutes just to find where the payment was stuck. … [With Orkes Conductor,] if there is a failure, we can retry from that specific step instead of restarting the whole process. Not only is that faster, but it avoids the risk of duplicate payments.”

• The platform engineering lead for the insurance provider provided some context for underwriting processes: “Right now, we are doing 30 to 40 workflows per day, and we expect that to go to around 300 per day as we add more products.”

• The CTO for the fintech organization noted: “Orkes Conductor supports 100% of our billing flows, with claims workflows also in production. This is critical because insurance is very dynamic and regulations change frequently,” highlighting the importance of these workflows to the organization.

• The chief architect for the banking services provider shared metrics around key processes: “We have 63 straight-through processes tied to customers with about 45 in production with Orkes now, and we expect that to keep growing.”

Modeling and assumptions. This benefit focuses on revenue associated with failed, delayed, or abandoned customer-facing interactions across use cases. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• For the purposes of this study, revenue protection represents protected operating profit from fewer failed, delayed, or abandoned customer-facing interactions.

• The composite processes 2.1 billion customer-facing task executions on Orkes Conductor per week in Year 1, 3.9 billion per week in Year 2, and 5.4 per week in Year 3.

• The exception rate for customer-facing task executions is 0.0015%.

• The gross reduction in exception handling with Orkes Conductor is 60%.

• The net reduction in exception handling with Orkes is 48% in Year 1, 54% in Year 2, and 60% by Year 3, based on the effectiveness ramp.

• The average revenue at risk per revenue-impacting customer-facing task execution is $50.

• The total revenue protected with Orkes Conductor is $39.2 million in Year 1, $81.9 million in Year 2, and $126.0 million in Year 3, representing 0.20%, 0.41%, and 0.63% of the composite’s overall revenues, respectively.

• The composite organization’s operating margin is 15%.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary from organization to organization based on:

• The throughput or velocity of customer-facing task executions per week.

• The organization’s revenue.

• The organization’s hours of operations.

• Exception rate for customer-facing task executions that result in failed, delayed, or abandoned interactions in the prior state.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 23%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $22.9 million.

Internal Operations Productivity Improvement

Evidence and data. Interviewees noted that Orkes Conductor improved internal operations productivity by reducing the manual intervention required to keep these use cases moving when task executions failed, stalled, or required remediation. They said that before adopting Orkes Conductor, their organizations relied on fragmented enterprise workflow environments where operations teams, application support, business users, and developers often had to identify exceptions manually, inspect logs, restart failed steps, reprocess work, or escalate to specialists to move internal workflows forward.

Interviewees said Orkes Conductor helped address these constraints with stateful execution, step-level visibility, targeted retries, failure workflows, and more automated exception handling, which reduced the time spent on repetitive remediation across internal use cases.

• The enterprise architect for the energy conglomerate relayed: “Prior orchestration-related incidents could take several hours to days to diagnose and resolve. With Orkes Conductor, failed workflow steps are easier to isolate, retry, and recover. Orkes Conductor is now our default enterprise workflow platform.”

• The platform engineering lead for the insurance provider said: “The [underwriting] process used to take two to three weeks. It was very manual. Now, for the processes supported by Orkes Conductor, it can be completed in less than 20 minutes.”

• The CTO for the fintech organization observed: “[The platform’s] event-driven state model and timer objects allow rapid adaptation to regulatory changes without code changes or application restarts. This is critical for our internal workflows to be compliant.”

Modeling and assumptions. This benefit focuses on productivity associated with internally focused processes and failed, delayed, or abandoned use cases. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The productivity gains are distributed across operations, support, technology, and business users.

• Productivity gains are modeled as reallocated capacity rather than headcount reduction.

• The composite processes 324 million internal task executions on Orkes Conductor per week in Year 1, 756 million per week in Year 2, and 1.296 million per week in Year 3.

• The manual intervention, or exception rate, for internal use cases is 0.003%.

• The composite’s internal use cases have lower task execution volume and less revenue-linked granularity than customer-facing use cases.

• The composite’s gross reduction in exception handling with Orkes Conductor is 60% for both internal and customer-facing use cases.

• The composite’s net reduction in exception handling with Orkes is 48% in Year 1, 54% in Year 2, and 60% by Year 3.

• The previous average time per manual intervention was 8 minutes.

• The modeled productivity savings accrue across a distributed population of internal operations, support, technology infrastructure, and business users rather than solely to the enterprise workflow orchestration team.

• The productivity savings represent incremental time recovered across the population and are expressed as FTE-equivalent savings.

• The fully burdened hourly rate for an enterprise workflow FTE across internal operations, support, technology infrastructure, and business users is $60.

• The composite’s productivity adjustment factor for these FTEs is 50%, reflecting that not all saved time translates into productive work.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary from organization to organization based on:

• The nature and complexity of internal use cases.

• The organization’s rate of manual intervention that result in failed, delayed, or abandoned interactions.

• The average time required per manual intervention.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $5.6 million.

Developer Productivity Improvement

Evidence and data. Interviewees said that prior to deploying Orkes Conductor, their organizations often embedded workflow logic directly in application code, relied on specialist BPM skills, or required developers to build custom orchestration capabilities such as retries, state handling, failure recovery, Kafka or API integrations, local testing frameworks, and workflow visibility. They explained that this made workflow development slow, sequential, and dependent on scarce expertise while pulling developers away from higher-value application and product work.

Interviewees noted that Orkes Conductor helped address these constraints with a developer-centric architecture, reusable workflow and sub-workflow definitions, language and API flexibility, local testing support, built-in retry and recovery patterns, native integration capabilities, and clearer separation between workflow orchestration and business logic. These reported this enabled development teams to spend less time engineering and maintaining custom enterprise workflow infrastructure and more time delivering new use cases, adapting existing use cases, and building customer- or business-facing functionality.

• The CTO for the fintech organization explained: “For regulated insurance use cases, Orkes Conductor’s clean APIs, configurable workflow model, and ability to avoid rebuilding custom workflow logic is a great advantage. What we were able to do in four business days with two to three engineers would have taken six months to a year with the same team.”

• The senior payments manager for the financial services organization explained: “If I define at the start that there are 10 steps needed, all 10 steps can be developed in parallel with Orkes Conductor. Whereas, if it would have been writing code, I would have to wait for step one to get completed, then get on to step 2, step 3, etc. It would have been sequential development.” They estimated this improved development speed by approximately 30% to 35%.

• The enterprise architect for the energy conglomerate observed: “With our prior BPM platform, workflows took 12 to 16 weeks with six to 10 people to develop. Orkes Conductor reduced delivery effort by roughly 25% to 30%.”

• The platform engineering lead for the insurance provider said: “With our previous step function platform, we would have to implement [auto-recovery] manually. We would have to allocate five FTEs for six months to build the orchestration workflow. Without Orkes Conductor, we would likely have to double the development team to deliver the same modules and capabilities.”

Modeling and assumptions. Unlike the first two benefits that deal with time savings for workflows in production usage, this benefit is specifically about the productivity improvement for the developers who build, modify, and maintain orchestrated use cases. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The number of developers who use Orkes Conductor on a weekly basis increases from 25 in Year 1 to 60 in Year 2 and 100 by Year 3.

• Each development FTE spends an average of 50% of their time using Orkes Conductor.

• The composite’s effective improvement in productivity for development FTEs is 32% in Year 1, 36% in Year 2, and 40% by Year 3.

• The fully burdened annual salary for a developer FTE is $175,500.

• The composite’s productivity adjustment factor for developer FTEs is 75%.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary from organization to organization based on:

• The nature and complexity of the use cases developed and maintained.

• The relative maturity of the development organization.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $3.1 million.

Reduced Production Downtime

Evidence and data. Interviewees said that before adopting Orkes Conductor, their organizations’ process orchestration environments were brittle, difficult to monitor, and dependent on specialist teams to diagnose and recover from high-severity workflow failures affecting orchestration platforms and downstream services. When failures occurred, teams often lacked clear state visibility, targeted recovery paths, or confidence in where to restart without broader disruption.

Interviewees Orkes Conductor helped address these challenges with durable state management, workflow observability, targeted retries, failure isolation, recovery from the failed step rather than full process restarts, auditability, and improved visibility into orchestration health. They reported this reduced the likelihood that workflow failures escalated into broader production downtime while helping teams shorten recovery windows when incidents occurred, which protected their organizations from customer-impacting disruption, operational downtime, and the response effort required from platform, engineering, operations, and support teams.

• The senior payments manager for the financial services organization relayed: “Before, it would have taken 30 or 35 minutes for a production support person to find where the payment was stuck. Now, because we can see the workflow step where it failed, it takes about 5 minutes.”

• The enterprise architect for the energy conglomerate observed: “Prior orchestration-related incidents could take several hours to days to diagnose and resolve. With Orkes Conductor, failed workflow steps are easier to isolate, retry, and recover - I would estimate in like 30 minutes. The reality is that we have had zero platform issues with Orkes in 18 months.”

Modeling and assumptions. This benefit breaks out into two components: the operating profit (loss) protected with Orkes Conductor, and the avoided labor for critical incident management. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Unlike Benefits A and B, which address interventions in stalled, hung, or restarted processes, this benefit focuses on high-severity incidents that impair the platform or an orchestrated service. The benefit is broken into operating profit (loss) protected and avoided labor for critical incident management.

• The composite experiences one major downtime incident per month.

• The average downtime per incident is 4 hours.

• The gross reduction in MTTR (or failure triage and recovery time) with Orkes Conductor is 80%.

• The net reduction in MTTR is 28.8% in Year 1, 56% in Year 2, and 80% in Year 3.

• The operating profit at risk per downtime hour is $45,000.

• On average, eight FTEs spend 6 hours resolving each major incident..

• Each major incident results in 4 hours of business downtime.

• The blended fully burdened hourly rate for an FTE who works on downtime incidents is $70.

• The composite’s productivity adjustment factor for affected incident management FTEs is 75%.

Risks. The scale of this benefit may vary from organization to organization based on:

• The complexity and velocity of the use cases.

• Scale of the organization.

• The skill level of the organization’s incident management FTEs.

• The organization’s industry and business model.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.6 million.

Unquantified Benefits

Benefits that provide value for the interviewees’ organizations but are not quantified for this study include:

• Improved enterprise workflow visibility. Interviewees noted that Orkes Conductor gave their organizations a more centralized way to understand, govern, and manage orchestrated use cases across teams and systems. This was especially valuable because prior environments often buried workflow states inside logs, application code, or specialist-owned platforms, limiting broader operational visibility.

• Increased confidence in enterprise-scale workflow orchestration. Several interviewees emphasized that Orkes Conductor gave their organizations confidence that their enterprise workflow platform could support increasing volumes and more mission-critical use cases without requiring a redesign of their orchestration strategy. They valued the platform’s architecture, clustering model, and ability to support production-scale process orchestration as usage expanded. The CTO for the fintech organization noted, “We want to bet with people who are smarter than us. Conductor has its roots in Netflix and scale is in their DNA.”

• Improved developer experience. Interviewees valued that Orkes Conductor fit modern engineering practices rather than forcing teams into a rigid legacy BPM model. Developers could work with familiar languages, APIs, workflow definitions, and deployment patterns, which made enterprise workflow more approachable and easier to adopt across distributed engineering teams. The chief architect for the banking services provider commented, “The feedback from engineers has been really positive. Conductor has been easy for them to deploy and use for orchestration.”

• Enhanced support for compliance and governance requirements. Interviewees valued Orkes Conductor’s ability to support self-hosted, hybrid, or controlled deployment models that aligned with security, compliance, and data-control requirements. This was especially important for organizations in financial services, banking, insurance, and energy, where sensitive data, auditability, and infrastructure control were essential. The chief architect for the banking services provider explained, “The private data stays internal. The process runs on Orkes, but the data is executed on our infrastructure.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Orkes Conductor and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Future flexibility for AI-enabled orchestration. Several interviewees discussed Orkes Conductor as a foundation for future AI-enabled orchestration. They said it provided structured workflows, auditability, human checkpoints, and clear control over task execution, giving their organizations a way to experiment with agentic AI while keeping AI-driven steps governed within deterministic enterprise workflow patterns.

• Faster adaptation to evolving use cases. Interviewees said Orkes Conductor gave their organizations more flexibility to revise use cases as business rules, customer needs, regulations, and operating models changed. They explained that teams could modify workflows more dynamically and extend existing use cases without reworking the underlying application architecture. The CTO for the fintech organization observed: “Insurance is very dynamic. Regulations change, and you have to update your systems in real time.”

• Expansion of workflow orchestration across the enterprise. Interviewees described Orkes Conductor as enabling their organizations to broaden their enterprise workflows beyond initial use cases or business units. The organizations applied process orchestration to additional domains such as payments, billing, claims, underwriting, procurement, logistics, HR, and customer-facing digital services. The enterprise architect for the energy conglomerate noted, “Use by use case and business workflow by business workflow, Orkes Conductor has become our default enterprise workflow platform.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Total Economic Impact Approach).