Camunda

Global telecommunication companies are facing enormous pressure from new market entrants with cutting-edge business models, ever-changing government regulations, and a hypercompetitive landscape. These factors are forcing market leaders to rethink their operating models and discover ways to cut time and friction from their processes. Legacy tech and long-proven ways of doing business quickly become the biggest barriers preventing monetization. Some telcos bear a too-costly burden of keeping outmoded systems online to maintain revenues from existing business units, which makes it harder to innovate and transform. One critical area where Amdocs is helping telcos companies transform the customer experience is order fulfillment. Engaging customers at the moment of need with precisely the right experience or offer can have a dramatic impact on sales. However, too often legacy services are supported by a large patchwork of legacy systems and loaded with manual and paper-intensive tasks.

Deutsche Telekom IT, the internal IT service provider of Deutsche Telekom AG, was facing several issues with its monolithic Oracle BPEL engine that was used to build and run BPM workflows and process automation. The monolithic system resulted in a lengthy time-to-market, lasting more than 12 months. Vendor lock-in limited the implementation of new features and it took five days to set up or make changes to environments. Releases took, on average, 1000 people-days or roughly three months to realize, and regression testing took around two days to process all test cases. In 2017, Deutsche Telekom IT adopted a ‘partially agile’ development approach, working in three-month sprints. However, all fixes had to be delivered together with larger change requests, which took considerable people-hours to accomplish. In addition, they were still struggling with the monolithic BPEL system, which didn’t allow for true agility.

Münchener Hypothekenbank eG, an independent real estate bank, was looking for innovative ways to stay competitive and decided to coordinate and automate internal processes within its private-client business. However, its existing process optimization system had its limits. The three processes - directing incoming mail, internal releasing of outgoing mail, and working together between departments on loan applications, across different systems - relied on the same process engine, making it impossible to carry out maintenance on one process independently of the others. Furthermore, the processes lacked the functions and interfaces to be freely configurable, resulting in increased complexity and a higher error rate.

LVM Insurance, one of the leading insurance groups in Germany, was facing challenges in managing its internal administrative processes and inventory management. The company had two different systems for order and processing, which were operated in parallel with no integration interface except for the user. The data was transferred manually using copy/paste, and the process was not controlled but based on a central document accessible to all employees involved. The actual process was in the employees' minds, and everyone knew when it was their turn and what they had to do. In the 'inventory management life' project, parts of the existing life-contract system were replaced by a new development. Asynchronous single processing was used, which had already been proven successful in other sectors. However, a lightweight solution was needed to reduce complexity for both developers and operations.

Visana, a Swiss health and accident insurer, processes around 32,000 documents daily and pays out up to CHF 12 million in treatment costs. The company prides itself on its customer service, promising to deliver policies within 20 minutes and agreed benefits within an average of eight working days. However, in 2015, Visana decided to further develop its technical infrastructure to accelerate workflows and improve the customer experience on its digital channels. The company needed a solution that could efficiently manage and optimize its workflow processes, identify resource bottlenecks, and aid in capacity planning.

Vodafone Germany faced several issues with its OTELO and branded reseller IT system. The system ran a vast number of different services, supporting an array of customer-facing channels – from campaigns and product offers to POS. However, it was impossible to separate the channels and, without an effective API layer in the infrastructure, Vodafone couldn’t establish an important online partner channel that was urgently required within its branded reseller and second brand segments. This legacy services technology wasn’t just ineffective to use and difficult to maintain, it created high maintenance and operating costs, a slow time-to-market for new products and an inconsistent customer experience. Vodafone needed to develop a truly agile, transparent and scalable approach. But with processes distributed everywhere imaginable within its system landscape, Vodafone needed to discover where its processes were and how they were performing, before it could migrate to a modern cloud-based infrastructure.

The logistics industry is characterized by complex rules and regulations, governing imports and exports across international borders, leading companies to build deep business process knowledge over many years. Automating these deeply customized processes with off-the-shelf software leads to poor solutions and user dissatisfaction. But individual software solutions developed specifically for companies are unreasonably expensive. Like every business, the production and logistics industries are facing intense pressure to modernize. Constant optimization of processes is necessary to maintain and differentiate a company in the face of ever-tougher competition.

DB Cargo, the most productive freight railway in Europe, faced a significant challenge in long-distance, cross-border traffic - ensuring the reliable and on-schedule transport of cargo. As part of the European production alliance Xrail, DB Cargo aimed to optimize cross-border interoperability through a central broker and agreed process models. However, the initial architectural approach to connect DB Cargo to the Xrail production alliance proved inefficient. The business logic and technical functions required for the Xrail processes had to be distributed across all involved systems, leading to increased complexity in service orchestration and transformation functionalities.

Deutsche Bahn, one of the largest transport and logistics companies in the world, was facing a challenge with its document-heavy process of providing reports on compensation obligations to the federal railway authority and other national authorities. This process was manually controlled and involved employees of various Deutsche Bahn subsidiaries as well as external consultants. The aim of the project was to shorten processing times and establish a uniform group-wide approach, including compensation commitments. The requirements for the project evolved during development, necessitating an agile approach.

Helvetia, a successful and international insurance group, was facing a challenge in the context of digitalisation. A central system for customer management had to be opened up to further channels. Extended, automated and manual review processes had to be implemented for changes made to personal data. Specific information and processes that were dependent on how certain data was changed were also required. In order to manage the processes during different types of events, a wide range of technical rules were required. Helvetia wanted to build a new central application that would store all assignment processes. These processes would review information and communicate with mailboxes according to the organizational structures in place. The department also required detailed reports on the processes and their tasks, for instance on throughput times.

Sparta Systems, a provider of enterprise quality management solutions (EQMS), was looking for a technology to manage workflows for its next-generation cloud-based products. The company wanted to offer a role with its software that enables business or compliance analysts to create and deploy business processes. While this could have been built internally, Sparta preferred to leverage third-party technology to take advantage of new features and functions without dedicating development resources to the effort. The company evaluated several BPM products, using criteria such as open source/OEM friendly license, wide community adoption, open standards and native support for BPMN 2.0, designer/modeler tooling availability, exposed APIs, embeddability within their application or consumable as a service, database support, scalability and performance, and process versioning.

In 2010, Generali Infrastructure Services introduced a monolithic cloud solution to provide IT services such as servers or platforms on demand. However, integration with the existing IT service management system and non-automated services was difficult and required considerable adjustments to the cloud solution. Complex processes could only be mapped rudimentarily in a proprietary process control system. The organizational and technical integration was very difficult in terms of operation and maintenance. For this reason, in late 2013 they decided to take an integrated approach to providing an integration platform with a focus on automation by means of business process management and a service-oriented architecture in the infrastructure services area.

Babylon Health, one of the largest National Health Service (NHS) practices in the UK, was confronted with a significant management challenge. Each consultation with a patient triggers a complex, personalised workflow combining human and automated tasks to ensure each patient receives the right treatment and doesn’t require any further support. With personalised workflows for every single consultation, managing these processes was a significant challenge. Additionally, the safety of patients is a consistent consideration throughout – losing track of a patient during a process can have a catastrophic effect on their personal health and cannot occur under any circumstances.

Sony DADC New Media Solutions was using a proprietary workflow engine based on Oracle PL / SQL, which was originally designed for the physical production of disks. The company wanted to provide business analysts and operations with a better insight into the implemented processes and their current execution, while also increasing the flexibility to address customer demands. They were considering developing a new workflow engine, but then weighed up a ‘make or buy’ decision. The company was expecting a very high number of simultaneously running processes or events to be processed, which is why they were eager to understand the Camunda Process Engine in detail.

Helsana, Switzerland’s largest healthcare insurer, was struggling with legacy, paper-based processes that were hindering its operations. The company had no easy way for customers to buy and approve products online, a feature that has become commonplace in the insurance industry. There was resistance to making the necessary process changes due to past negative experiences with monolithic, centralized process engines. These past process automation projects were associated with long hours of additional work, brittle code, and expensive consultancy fees. The challenge was to change the mindset about modern, lightweight, and flexible process automation and to demonstrate how it could benefit the business as a whole.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) was facing a growing backlog of claims due to manual processing, specialized domain expertise requirements for claims processors, and competing priorities for key knowledge resources. Factors such as new legislation and the COVID-19 pandemic increased the urgency for a solution that could be delivered quickly. The VA needed a new, highly modern solution to shorten benefits claims processing and clear the claim backlog. The solution needed to integrate machine learning and business process automation to expedite pension, Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC), and burial claims processing.

R+V Versicherung AG, one of the largest insurance companies in Germany, was facing challenges with its old, monolithic software solution for business process management (BPM). The inflexible system required months of preparation for a release change, involving many manual tests and complete environment rebuilds. This process often resulted in system failures, negatively impacting the customer experience. Furthermore, updates were only carried out every few years, with smaller updates several times a year, limiting the company's agility and ability to respond to new requirements quickly.

The hospitality industry was facing a crisis due to the global pandemic. The business model was workforce-heavy and expensive, and the industry was dealing with technology limitations that prevented them from offering a seamless data-driven digital guest experience or an intuitive employee solution. SV Group, a leading hospitality company operating in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, wanted to create a disruptive, end-to-end digital guest journey and an all-encompassing employee solution. They wanted to make it seamless for guests to book, check-in, enjoy their stay, and check out, thereby creating a superior customer experience. At the same time, they wanted to provide their employees with a one-stop solution that allowed them to service their guests in a proactive way. The biggest challenge of this ambitious project was orchestrating various cloud microservices to ensure critical processes run without issue to deliver a consistently exceptional guest experience.

SV Informatik, a provider of custom IT solutions for insurance companies, was in search of a new modeling tool for business processes. They needed a solution that would allow for process documentation, partial automation, and closer cooperation between the specialist area and IT. The company also faced challenges in handling mass loss events, such as storms, which could result in thousands of damage reports within a few days. These reports had to be manually transferred to the relevant insurance system, a process that was time-consuming and inefficient.

Automating land titling and taxation requires developing workflows that often incorporate more than a century’s worth of historical land and title data, mortgage information, cadastral maps, and more. In some cases, new titles may bring previously unregistered land onto tax rolls for the first time, creating new records adding tax revenue for a municipality. Land titling offices also have to keep up with an ever-changing regulatory environment and tax structure. Automated workflows for land titling and deed registration aren’t static, and land administrators need flexibility to customize titling and deed processes regularly and visibility to see that land transfers are processed and recorded efficiently.

24 Hour Fitness was facing challenges with their existing system. Their orchestration, transformation, and business rules were buried in Java code, making it time-consuming to understand how their systems operated, bring new hires up to speed, and answer use case questions. The complexity of their business rules and the general mistakes that naturally occur in human communication made it time-consuming and error-prone to translate information from the product owners to developers and vice versa.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) was facing challenges with their proprietary solution for the execution of business processes. Communication between the business side and IT was very difficult. The complexity and cost of process implementation was very high. The operation of the processes and the development of changes and improvements were difficult and depended on the expertise of specific persons. They have complex business processes that change frequently and generally very complex security requirements. Their compliance was difficult to monitor. In order to achieve a more business-driven development, they opted for the use of Business Process Management (BPM).

freenet.de, a subsidiary of freenet Group, aimed to efficiently support key sales processes with software solutions. These processes were in the areas of contracting, upgrading, and termination of services of the product lines freenetMail, single.de, and portal (freenet.de). While these processes were largely automated, the solution for process support had to be reevaluated due to the outsourcing of billings for the offered services to a specialized service provider. The existing solution, which had been developed individually for a decade, was efficient and offered many features. However, the expenses for maintenance and modification of the solution were high, necessitating a more cost-saving model. In this context, OPITZ CONSULTING was commissioned to select an appropriate architecture and support with its implementation.

Zymergen, a molecular technology company, was facing challenges in expediting the process of onboarding new projects while maintaining process efficiency and customizability. With an increase in clients, the company needed to reduce the time required to onboard new projects while still guaranteeing efficient and customizable processes. This required a solution that could integrate with its automation and digital systems while providing a flexible interface for scientists and other non-programmers to create, update, and execute these complex workflows.

T-Mobile Austria operates in a highly competitive telecommunications market, serving around 7.5 million customers. The company needs to regularly deliver new products and services to meet high consumer expectations. Business teams at T-Mobile Austria design new products, services, and promotions, and it's up to IT teams to implement these ideas as quickly as possible. Slow delivery risks products becoming irrelevant in a fast-moving space. Implementing new products involves a significant amount of complexity for the more than 100 developers who are responsible for implementation. T-Mobile Austria needs to integrate with more than 40 different back-end systems to ensure that customers have a seamless experience when using new products, and the company adheres to strict service level agreements to deliver best-in-class quality.

Atlassian, a global software company with over 4,000 employees, was seeking to support its enterprise-wide business process automation initiatives. These initiatives spanned various departments including finance, commerce, marketing, and customer support. One of the initial projects involved integrating a new SaaS-based accounting platform to centralize finance workflows and revenue recognition processes. Several other projects were also in the pipeline, including process automation for Salesforce lead management and routing customer support cases.

Città di Lugano, a local government agency in Switzerland, aimed to increase the quality of life, provide better, sustainable services and to improve governance by providing easily accessible, always available, user-friendly and transparent digital services. They wanted to enable all customers, whether they be citizens, visitors or businesses, to trigger and actively participate in business processes. However, they needed a robust and scalable solution to achieve this. They evaluated three different solutions available on the market, but ultimately chose Camunda.