Camunda BPM at Zalando
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
Country
- Germany
Product
- Camunda BPM
Tech Stack
- Java
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Supply Chain Visibility
- Inventory Management
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
Zalando is Europe's largest online platform for fashion. The company offers an extensive range of men, women, and children's fashion as well as accessories and sporting goods. Zalando works with more than 1,500 brand-name manufacturers. The Berlin-based company was founded in 2008 by Robert Gentz and David Schneider and now supplies a total of 15 European markets. Since 2014, Zalando has used the Camunda BPM platform for the execution of its customer orders. This includes the creation of accounting data, checking of coupons, communication with payment service providers, holding of articles in the logistics centers, sending order confirmations, fraud check, and communication with the ERP system.
The Challenge
Zalando, Europe's largest online platform for fashion, was facing a challenge with the processing of its customer orders. The process included business logic and numerous service integrations, such as the coupon service, the stock service, the payment service, the partner service, and integration with the logistics system and SAP. The logic of this process was extremely complex and covered many special cases, which depended on factors like the location of the customer, the method of payment, or shipping address. The process had initially been automated via a self-developed 'process framework'. However, this was not optimally designed and difficult to understand for the product managers. The process documentation and the actual code diverged again and again and the process logic was spread across multiple systems. As a result, it was almost impossible to understand the actual operation of this strategically important core process.
The Solution
Zalando decided to implement the Camunda BPM platform to handle its complex order processing. The decision was motivated by several factors including simple configurability, easy embeddability into the existing infrastructure due to its Java orientation, good technical scalability, and good consultation and cooperation with Camunda. The implementation process involved understanding and displaying the organically grown process in BPMN. Test scenarios for all business transactions with Camunda, as well as integration tests for end-to-end process, were developed. A high availability runtime environment with frontend nodes for load balancing and backend nodes to perform the jobs was put in place. Due to the amount of data, the order data is distributed to eight structurally identical databases. The key to finding the information is the email of the customer. To implement this sharding strategy one Camunda Process Engine per shard was established.
Operational Impact
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