Making business process change an ongoing process, with Camunda

Any organization is in a constant state of flux of changing business imperatives, a dynamic personnel, and overall shifts in strategy. Many will invest in personnel and systems that drive the processes of business transformation. Enterprises striving for better results are recognizing the value of automating core business processes.

Automating repetitive tasks or decision-making is one of the most obvious ways in which software and technology deployments can improve productivity. Automating underlying business processes effectively works in much the same kind of way, although sometimes it will take the work of a specialist business analyst to be able to tease out the tasks specific to an industry. The core raison d’etre will be enabling the changes by means of producing software and systems which support the business. The challenge is in unifying internal (or closely-outsourced) development efforts with business owners such as SVPs of divisions and change managers. It is likely that developers and business teams find most success when they collaborate on workflow automation from the beginning.

Camunda‘s BPM solutions, for instance, typically operate in areas of business that are particularly specialized, such as finance and insurance. In these areas, defining concrete tasks and processes is particularly sensitive, both because of the sensitivity of customers’ assets, but also because of regulatory compliance pressures. However, business processes are similar enough across the board to make Camunda’s solutions suitable for telcos, media, software and e-commerce industries too.

Camunda’s solutions combine community open source frameworks with add-on paid-for elements. Enterprises may wish to develop their own end-user interfaces to the open source offerings, but many opt for the in-built power and functionality offered in the enterprise edition. While Camunda offers fully-featured process modeling and analysis tools for non-developers, it’s also a developer-friendly product, offering an open-source and lightweight engine that’s easy to integrate with other systems.

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Launched as a consulting company in 2008, the company began to find its feet as an open source and enterprise product from about 2013/14, and today its users include household names such as T-Mobile, Allianz, Universal Music, Goldman Sachs, and NASA.

The BPMN and DMN platforms are easy to use for developers, and are lightweight. The engines can be deployed via a RESTful API or as a discrete JAR embedded in larger applications, and are flexible enough to be able to scale up to enterprise level. The engines scale to cluster deployment and are capable of massive throughput.

The Camunda BPMN workflow & DMN decision engines (open source) can be used headless via integrated APIs or by using the front-end applications:

• Modeler (open source): edit process diagrams & DMN decision tables for execution in the engines.
• Tasklist (open source): a web app allowing users to work on assigned tasks.
• Cockpit (paid): monitor workflows & decisions in production to monitor and solve technical problems.
• Admin (open source): manage the web app and API users, create groups and control privileges. Includes LDAP integration if required.
• Optimize (paid): create reports and dashboards, set up alerts and analyze process bottlenecks.

The company has found its solutions are deployed in similar situations, regardless of industry. These typically might include replacing legacy BPMS products, or developing replacements for home-grown workflow software which has grown up organically with a company, but outlived its usefulness – often lack of scalability is the issue as an organization expands.

The Camunda BPMN and DMN engines provide reliable execution and very high throughputs despite their lightweight nature (footprints measured in MB). The engines are a natural fit for microservices orchestration – the BPM is small enough to be embedded into a microservice.

By providing the necessary interface between business analysts and development teams, and ensuring that the ensuing apps produce fruitful results, hundreds if not thousands of processes can be automated while integrating with multiple back-end systems.

To learn more about how Camunda’s BPMN and DMN solutions can power your business process management efforts and form a true synergy between development team and business outcomes, get in touch with an adviser near you today.