Enterprise Order Workflow

A large enterprise runs an order-processing platform. An order moves through seven stages: created, validate customer, check inventory, reserve inventory, charge payment, create shipment, send confirmation. Each stage may involve a different microservice and some operations take minutes. If payment fails after inventory has been reserved, the system must release that inventory. If the shipment service is temporarily unavailable, the workflow should wait and retry rather than failing the whole order. The company wants visibility into the state of every order and does not want developers implementing complex workflow state management themselves.