Camunda: Path to efficiency with custom BPM solutions

Why Camunda BPM?

From a business perspective, we’ll focus on what Forrester’s research summarized:

• Increase in overall operational efficiency because of back-office process automation across multiple departments and business units.
• Reduced risks and improved regulatory compliance with widespread process automation.
• Reduced development timelines and increased business agility as a result of faster development and easier change of processes.
• Increased customer satisfaction due to process automation.

From a technical perspective, Camunda, with its different iterations, covers a variety of architectures it can fit into.

• It is robust and offers great extendability coupled with fine-grained customization.
• Automated tasks can be backed up with custom-written implementations, extending your integration scope further.
• The engine and its relevant services are also exposed and can be connected, allowing you to apply your custom-tailored user interface solutions.

All that sounds great, so we’re sure you want to know how Camunda integration achieves all that.

Camunda Features and Benefits

Let’s explore together some of Camunda’s features and benefits they bring:

• Integration and centralization of various systems that lead to operational efficiency,
• Handling error events and increasing process visibility,
• Optimizing manual tasks and improving process quality,
• Keeping living business processes and development changes,
• Overview and auditing leading to better collaboration between IT departments and stakeholders.

Camunda Example

To best illustrate these, we will use a small process as an example described in BPMN. But before we begin, a quick explanation of what BPMN is.

For this example, we will only focus on the surface level diagram. But, keep in mind that most of the elements you see are backed up by additional metadata that allows Camunda’s process engine to properly execute the process.

So, back to our example: a small company that provides custom-assembled and on-demand products. Its order-handling process in BPMN representation looks like this:

Integration and Centralization 

Camunda offers you a chance to centralize your business logic by bringing different systems together without the need to modify them to suit some specific processes’ needs. For example, in a system with many services, like microservice architecture, Camunda is used to orchestrate API use of different systems in order to define business or provisioning flows.

Our example company uses a few systems:

• a customer provisioning service,
• a product catalog,
• a storage management service.

As long as these systems can be interfaced, using Camunda we can easily integrate them into processes. Any relevant data we need to fetch can be stored as process variables. This effectively builds us a context for the process that can be accessed by any of the following tasks. Additionally, the context we build throughout the process gives us a great summary of what happened.

So now, just glancing at the variables will give us a perfect overview of the order. We can see all relevant details about the customer, the requested product, and the results of its assembly.

Handling error events

It’d be great if we could draw our happy path process and call it done, but life is rarely that kind.

Things can go wrong, and unfortunately, these paths complicate our processes quite a bit, often requiring varying steps to address them.

For example, if our example company doesn’t have all the required parts to assemble the product, we can:

1. initiate a request for new parts, wait for it to be completed so we can return to handling our order,
2. cancel the order.

This design both allows and promotes clearly defining exceptional states in your processes. Having this clear distinction, Camunda makes recovery easier and far more streamlined.

Additionally, Forrester reported improving process quality for its composite organization, saving $15 million over three years. 

“Because the composite organization is a global company in a highly regulated industry, process errors require manual work to fix and, in the worst case, can result in fines. Process automation reduces the likelihood of errors, so the composite organization avoids costs it would have otherwise incurred.”

Optimizing manual tasks

Depending on your environment and processes, eliminating the need for manual input or review might be impossible.

However, what can make these tasks far more efficient and valuable is keeping them concise and contextualized.

As mentioned, Camunda builds context through process variables during executing processes. Because of that, we can easily format user tasks to provide all the necessary information someone might need to complete them quickly.

It keeps users focused and minimizes the chance of mistakes.

A living process

Processes can commonly hit a few “wait states” in their lifecycle. We all experienced that one order which simply got “stuck” somewhere for a week. Keeping track of these can be challenging since it can involve manual input, waiting for external messages, a specific time, etc.

That’s why having a living instance of a process that contains these states ensures they are never forgotten or lost.

With Camunda, expected events are continuously tracked and easily displayed.

Overview & auditing

Something easily overlooked is the amount of extra details and insight Camunda immediately brings to your processes. Given their design, having separated systems and tracking what happens to different entities can be difficult or even impossible. Bringing them together to form a complete picture can be yet another challenge.

Camunda gives you a clear overview of everything in your process. It saves all relevant information in its context and clearly outlines paths and decisions taken.

Camunda also indirectly enriches your other systems by integrating with them. Suddenly, a change in another system that was processed through Camunda becomes fully audited.

Camunda leads to Powerful Orchestration

On a broader note, with Camunda and similar BPM systems, you will introduce a powerful orchestrator to your processes. It will let you keep your business logic in one place, backed up with all the necessary information.

For example, after Beeline, a pioneer of vendor management systems (VMS), acquired Utmost, it was crucial to transition and integrate the operations of both systems without disrupting any ongoing processes since 350 global enterprises, like Disney, Meta, Pfizer, rely on Beeline’s software.

Using Camunda BPM, Utmost had already connected many of their different modules, providing their customers with the ability to configure their own business flows within the system. This baseline allowed them to easily expand and integrate with new operations brought by Beeline.

Start with your Camunda Integration

Camunda establishes a solid basis for further maturation focused on efficiency, precision, and consistency. This can enable a new perspective on your processes and what they can accomplish.