Nik Hewitt, Author at Camunda https://camunda.com Workflow and Decision Automation Platform Tue, 13 May 2025 18:07:36 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://camunda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Secondary-Logo_Rounded-Black-150x150.png Nik Hewitt, Author at Camunda https://camunda.com 32 32 RSM Creates a Future-Proof Engagement Ecosystem with Camunda’s AI Orchestration https://camunda.com/blog/2025/03/rsm-camunda-ai-orchestration/ Wed, 19 Mar 2025 20:53:41 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=131506 With AI orchestration, RSM improved process efficiency, enhanced business visibility, reduced administrative tasks, and updated legacy technology.

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Within the audit, tax, and consulting services industry, firms constantly seek ways to innovate, stay competitive, stand out against the crowd, and deliver exceptional service levels and value to their clients.

RSM US LLP, the leading US provider of assurance, tax, and consulting services, recently changed and simplified its engagement lifecycle. Their goals included:

  • Enhancing process visibility
  • Reducing regular administrative tasks
  • Modernizing all the stages and processes of interaction with a client or customer, from the initial contact to the conclusion of services

Tom Clark, assurance digital integration leader at RSM, and Ken Koch, forensic market leader at RSM/BDO, joined us at CamundaCon NYC 2024 to speak about their transformation journey. Together, they delved into how RSM embraced Camunda to improve process visibility, composability, and audit process efficiency. In their presentation, Tom and Ken discussed how RSM revamped its engagement lifecycle using Camunda, incorporating legacy solutions and creating an engagement ecosystem for improved efficiency—from client acceptance to closure.

Legacy systems have often accumulated technical debt from rapid fixes and ad hoc solutions. Camunda helps organizations tackle this debt by offering a composable, open architecture that modernizes and consolidates applications. This dramatically reduces maintenance time and allows organizations to remain agile and adaptable to changing business demands.

Resolving inefficacies within siloed infrastructures

RSM, renowned for its industry-leading services, faced a daunting challenge: its legacy process management ecosystem consisted of 26 different applications that were not effectively communicating with each other.

This fragmentation led to potential inefficiencies, such as manual data transfers and a lack of visibility into the status of thousands of active customer journeys. Auditors and staff were bogged down with administrative tasks, detracting from client-focused work. Overall, the outdated engagement lifecycle threatened productivity and scalability.

Tom Clark recognized the need for change. “The existing system was complex and cumbersome, hindering our ability to deliver the level of service we aimed for,” he explained.

Ken Koch added, “Our teams were spending significant time on tasks that could be automated, which was not the best use of their expertise.”

Streamlining end-to-end processes with Camunda

RSM’s strategic initiative was to overhaul its audit process, boost productivity, and elevate client services. The firm turned to Camunda to replace the technology-driven process with an orchestrated, process-driven approach that leverages technology for optimal customer engagement and performance.

Camunda empowers organizations to fully leverage their existing resources while facilitating strategic transformations that elevate customer and employee experiences. Camunda’s intelligent process orchestration and automation platform helps organizations:

  • Overcome the limitations of legacy systems
  • Drive digital transformation
  • Achieve long-term success by enhancing agility, efficiency, IT/business collaboration, and scalability.

In their presentation, “RSM – Legacy to Process Orchestration Journey,” Clark and Koch discuss how implementing Camunda at RSM achieved benefits like enhanced visibility, reduced admin tasks, modernized engagement, and increased efficiency.

Enhanced visibility into engagements

Camunda Optimize provided real-time insights into active engagements, enabling centralized monitoring and management without the need for manual check-ins. This transparency allowed anyone within the organization to quickly understand the current status of any engagements.

“What we’ve done with Camunda means anyone concerned can push a button and see the current status of everything. This means they don’t have to go out to that customer team and say, Hey, what’s going on with this engagement? Where are you in these steps? Do you have issues? That’s better for us and better for our customers.” – Ken Koch, Forensic Market Leader, RSM/BDO 

Reduced administrative tasks

Automating repetitive tasks significantly reduced time spent on administrative activities, freeing RSM to focus on adding value to client interactions.

In the first four months alone, RSM saved an estimated 720,000 hours during customer engagement, translating into substantial cost savings.

“We can take all this monolithic code, 26 applications, and wrap it into a single orchestrated end-to-end engagement life cycle. In our first four months, we had 9,000 customer engagements running through Camunda, and we’re looking at 80 hours per engagement of savings.” – Tom Clark, Assurance Digital Integration Leader, RSM

Modernized engagement lifecycle

RSM restructured its engagement lifecycle with Camunda, creating a future-ready engagement ecosystem that streamlined the entire process from client acceptance to engagement closure. Data normalization, modularity, and enhanced visibility facilitated this transformation.

“If we want to use agile technology and keep pace with business demand, we need people to be agile and processes to be agile. By creating a complete vision that talks about how this impacts people, technology, and processes and how it impacts the bottom line, through that analysis, I was able to show our leadership team that with the same headcount, we can process 20% more clients. And for us, that’s huge.” – Tom Clark, Assurance Digital Integration Leader, RSM

Increased capacity, savings, and training efficiency

The adoption of Camunda had a notable impact on RSM’s operations. Automating repetitive tasks and integrating applications into a single system led to considerable time savings, translating into cost savings.

As mentioned earlier, in just the first four months after implementing Camunda, RSM saved an estimated 720,000 hours across customer engagements. Training requirements for new hires were also reduced as processes became more streamlined and less complex.

“A lot of it’s about efficiencies and time savings. Previously, developers had to learn 26 tools, and they had to know in their heads about this one, then over here that one, but now if it’s orchestrated for them, and because of this training becomes far easier in the future.” – Tom Clark, Assurance Digital Integration Leader, RSM

Savings continue to accrue as RSM embeds further efficiencies into its processes. RSM expects process orchestration integration to extend beyond customer engagement, influencing auditors’ work and supporting services like consultations and resource assignments.

The project’s success has fostered a greater willingness within the wider organization to consider further process orchestration and automation solutions across other areas of business functionality.

Continuous improvement and agility

Implementing Camunda has been a significant step in modernizing RSM’s audit process, enhancing cross-company process visibility, greatly reducing manual and administrative tasks, and significantly simplifying the engagement lifecycle. The firm has laid a strong foundation for continuous improvement and agility, enabling it to:

  • Adapt to future changes in technology (such as leveraging artificial intelligence integration) and business practices (such as changes in legislation or adopting regional banking standards)
  • Roll out tested composable processes and orchestration to the broader global organization
  • Better serve its customers

If you would like to know more about RSM’s transformative journey to create a future-proof customer engagement ecosystem, you can watch their CamundaCon presentation right here.

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Payter Considers the Future of Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies https://camunda.com/blog/2025/02/payter-future-business-orchestration-automation-technologies/ Fri, 21 Feb 2025 17:15:00 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=129468 Payter’s global strategy leans on Camunda for 24/7 frictionless onboarding, improved process response times, and managing hypergrowth.

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During CamundaCon New York, 2024, Andre Bal, Director of Supply Chain and Automation at Payter, and Floris Weegink, Field CTO at Incentro, took to our stage to discuss the future of process orchestration and the Camunda advantage. Using the analogy of Gartner’s business orchestration and automation technologies (BOAT) category, the duo spoke at length about preparing for the busy future of near-field communication (NFC) and cashless technology. They talked about giving their customers the necessary onboarding experience for payment terminal setup now and making preparations for tomorrow.

“We want our customers to be able to get their terminals online 24/7 with as little fuss as possible. We need the power to accommodate a significant market shift towards automation and self-service, enhancing our scalability and agility, and to handle future growth and inevitable increase in volume.”
—André Bal, Director of Supply Chain and Automation, Payter

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In the fast-paced world of near-field communication (NFC) and cashless transactions, Payter is setting the bar high. The company has been laser-focused on perfecting its customer and payment terminal onboarding processes to keep up with an ever-growing demand for automation and self-service capabilities. Recognizing the need for seamless integration of digital and physical workflows, Payter turned to Camunda and our gold partner, Incentro, to create a robust back-end for its 24/7 global service platform.

“We’re looking at new territories, and scalability, adaptability, and composability are key. For each territory, there are specific banking certifications and standards, and we need to slot those in with minimum fuss. That’s the real power of Camunda: flexibility without needing a high-code solution where you have to build that into your code.”
—André Bal, Director of Supply Chain and Automation, Payter

Since becoming a Camunda partner in 2019, the cutting-edge digital services company Incentro has offered its international clients advanced solutions for organizing and automating business processes. This includes everything from creating processes to implementing them and continually improving them. With over twenty years of experience, Incentro is collaborating with Camunda to transform how companies work and interact with their customers.

Riding the wave of hypergrowth

The “BOAT” metaphor is introduced in the presentation to symbolize the advanced orchestration system Payter requires for its complex supply chain operations and readiness for the coming demand and customer expectations. Weegink explains that “BOAT” represents a process orchestration layer essential for automating Payter’s enterprise processes and how Camunda satisfies the requirements of Gartner’s benchmarks. Embracing the concept, Bal agrees that this orchestrated system they are developing with Camunda 8 is crucial for navigating Payter’s projected market growth and ensuring the company’s readiness for future challenges.

“In existing processes, everything touches everything else and works toward the same goal, so composability and the ability to reuse those processes allows us to expand and transition into more territories and areas of the business far more easily.”
—Floris Weegink, Field CTO, Incentro

Payter stands at the cutting edge of NFC and cashless technology, leading the charge in a market that is swiftly pivoting towards self-service and automation. The goal is clear: to scale up efficiently while managing an inevitable surge in volume and demand. In short, for Payter, riding the BOAT wave is a guideline for creating future-ready infrastructure and solutions.

Plain sailing with orchestration and automation

Through the implementation of Camunda’s process orchestration and automation platform, Payter has connected its enterprise resource planning (ERP) and terminal management systems with a customer-facing portal. This integration allows for a smooth, automated end-to-end process for configuring, deploying, and managing payment terminals.

Payter has harnessed the power of Camunda 8 to orchestrate and automate a multitude of operations, planning to leverage the latest in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM), and integration platform as a service (iPaaS). Low-code applications and RPA bots have been and will be instrumental in this transformation, enabling rapid application development and the automation of repetitive tasks.

According to Andre Bal, the results speak for themselves.

“We’ve gone down from a week to onboard a payment terminal to 10 minutes; I’ve even seen as little as 10 seconds!”
Andre Bal, Director of Supply Chain and Automation, Payter

This drastic reduction in onboarding time from up to five business days to minutes is a testament to the power of Camunda’s process orchestration capabilities. It has granted Payter the agility and composability needed for future growth, ensuring a friction-free user experience and effectively managing growth without the overhead of disproportionately increasing staff numbers.

The future with Camunda

With rapid growth on the horizon, Payter is confidently preparing for its next evolutionary phase. The scalable tech stack means that Payter is ready to handle increased demands, ensuring processes can adapt and support global operations around the clock. Camunda brings modern capabilities to the table, such as end-to-end process orchestration and AI integration, in a cloud-native architecture that is both scalable and resilient.

Payter’s journey with Camunda and RPA has streamlined its onboarding process and positioned the company as a nimble, forward-thinking leader in the cashless technology space. Many leading technology companies are now using Camunda to streamline service-driven processes and focus on innovation, looking to a future where the requirements behind BOAT will be essential to staying competitive and offering a level of service that customers will expect as standard.

“We’re a tech company, and we want to leverage technology to its full potential. Now, if that road leads us to machine learning, and that’s definitely something we’re interested in. We’re ready.”
Andre Bal, Director of Supply Chain and Automation, Payter

This strategic partnership has enabled Payter to deliver an improved customer experience, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and subsequent retention rates. As Payter continues to grow, its orchestrated approach between people, systems, and devices will remain pivotal to delivering efficient and innovative solutions to the market. With Camunda, Payter is future-ready, whatever that future may hold.

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Infosys and Camunda: Embracing AI for the Future of Process Orchestration https://camunda.com/blog/2025/02/infosys-and-camunda-embracing-ai-for-the-future-of-process-orchestration/ Thu, 13 Feb 2025 19:35:23 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=128769 At CamundaCon 2024, Bhupesh Naik showed how Infosys and Camunda are using AI for process automation and orchestration.

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Digital transformation is a modern business essential. At CamundaCon New York, 2024, Bhupesh Naik (AVP, AI, and automation strategic business head at Camunda platinum partner Infosys) delivered his insightful presentation “AI as the Next UI—Driving Intelligent Straight Through Processing Using Camunda.

A Camunda partner since 2019, Infosys is a next-gen digital and technology services firm and innovator. They provide their global enterprise clients with streamlined process orchestration and automation, encompassing process design, execution, and ongoing improvement. With a storied history stretching over two decades, the global tech giant is working with Camunda to revolutionize how businesses operate and engage with their customers.

Bhupesh’s demonstration shows Infosys’s commitment to innovation, highlighting the amalgamation of Camunda’s process orchestration and automation platform into the company’s service offerings. Focusing on large strategic customers, including Fortune 1000 and 2000 companies, Infosys has been dedicated to improving the customer journey by leveraging the power of Camunda and artificial intelligence (AI).

A legacy transformed

Infosys’s journey with Camunda began with the need to overhaul a client’s antiquated process automation system, which dated back to 2004. While once cutting-edge, this legacy system had become a liability. It was unsupported, with no clear update path, and posed significant security and compliance risks.

The migration to Camunda’s platform was a game-changer. It allowed Infosys to automate over 650 critical processes, which, according to Bhupesh, were previously fraught with inefficiencies and potential for error.

The imminent AI revolution

The transformation didn’t stop with automation. Infosys has boldly embraced AI, investing in open-source solutions and creating a suite of AI assets, including advanced AI models and platforms, that have become integral to the company’s operations. Infosys has adopted an AI-first mantra, using AI to drive transformation within its own walls and for its clients.

During the showcase, Bhupesh walked through real-world applications of this AI-driven approach. One standout example was the reimagining of the insurance claim process.

Traditionally, this process was labor-intensive, involving numerous steps, forms, and manual data entries that could lead to human error and delays. With the integration of Camunda’s process orchestration and automation platform and AI, Infosys has streamlined this into a conversational, intelligent process that can handle claims with speed and accuracy, vastly improving the customer experience.

A seamless, conversational experience

Bhupesh’s demo features an insurance claim scenario in which the claimant, following an accident, could report the incident through a mobile app. AI facilitated this interaction, analyzing the claimant’s speech, assessing damage through uploaded images, and processing documents like police reports. Camunda’s platform orchestrates all of this, managing the process state transitions based on AI inputs.

The result was a frictionless experience requiring no tedious form-filling or navigating multiple screens. Instead, the AI provided a conversational interface that could understand the situation, ask relevant questions, and even offer additional services (like vehicle towing) based on the context of the incident.

The impact of Camunda 8

Looking forward, Infosys is excited about the potential of the Camunda 8 platform. Upcoming iterations and releases of Camunda 8 promise to make AI integration even more seamless, offering enhanced capabilities for a more robust and scalable workflow automation solution. 

Bhupesh anticipates that this migration will further empower Infosys developers to focus on business-oriented solutions rather than getting bogged down in technical minutiae.

Camunda 8 offers the following advantages and features:

  • High resilience and scalability: Camunda 8 uses a distributed architecture that provides high resilience and horizontal scalability, enabling the execution of large volumes of process instances without performance bottlenecks.
  • Decoupled processing: The external task pattern allows for the decoupling of process execution from the worker performing the task, enhancing system agility and flexibility.
  • Cloud-native: Camunda 8 is a cloud-native solution with options for both SaaS and self-managed deployments, reducing maintenance overhead and improving operational efficiency.
  • Improved operational efficiency: The platform provides tools like Operate for real-time visibility into running processes and Optimize for comprehensive analytics, helping teams continuously improve business processes.
  • Enhanced collaboration: The web or desktop-based process Modeler, which supports BPMN and DMN standards for process and decision modeling, can help developers and business users collaborate more effectively.
  • Future-proofing: Camunda 8 is designed to support future innovations and integrations, making it a robust choice for long-term process orchestration and automation needs.

Preparing for a responsible AI future

As Infosys continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible with process automation, it remains conscientious about AI’s implications. The company is a pioneer in responsible AI, having achieved ISO 42001:2023 certification for its practices in this area.

Infosys has developed AI guardrails to prevent issues like hallucination and bias and to ensure auditability and explainability, a vital feature for regulatory compliance.

A practical approach to AI integration

By identifying common patterns in screen usage—data capture, decision-making, status flagging, and information collation—Infosys has mapped AI solutions to each pattern. For instance, document analytics can replace manual data entry screens, while chatbots and voice recognition systems can transform conversational interfaces into intelligent agents capable of understanding and executing user commands.

Bhupesh discusses how this strategic approach ensures that every aspect of process automation is optimized with AI, from the initial customer interaction to the final task execution. By building an AI agent for each role, Infosys is creating a role-based architecture that is more dynamic and efficient than traditional layer-based architectures.

The road ahead

Infosys isn’t only adapting to change but actively shaping it. It is driving the convergence of AI and machine learning and leveraging orchestration and process automation through Camunda to create intelligent solutions that redefine what is possible.

As businesses worldwide seek efficiency and innovation, Infosys and Camunda are committed to responsible AI practices, positioning them as ideal partners for enterprises looking ahead of their digital competitors and offering the best possible customer experience.

The journey toward an AI-first enterprise is well underway, and Infosys and Camunda are leading the charge with a clear vision, robust framework, and a keen understanding of the transformative power of technology.

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State of Zeebe Performance: Benchmarking Camunda’s Workflow Engine for Scalability https://camunda.com/blog/2025/02/state-of-zeebe-performance/ Sat, 08 Feb 2025 00:45:43 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=128143 Falko Menge talks at CamundaCon about platform benchmarking tests for Zeebe.

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One of Camunda’s founding values is our commitment to being open. We live that value daily by providing access to Camunda’s codebase on GitHub, supporting a vibrant community ecosystem, and being transparent about our technology’s capabilities.

Falko Menge, Camunda’s senior principal solution architect and open standards ambassador, shared the results of recent platform benchmarking tests with our CamundaCon audience in this spirit of openness and community.

Why benchmarking Camunda’s workflow engine is important

As developers know, benchmarking provides actionable insights into product quality and helps refine performance. It’s an important part of our continual development processes, now more than ever, for two main reasons.

First, orchestrated, end-to-end automation of disparate processes, systems, devices, data, and AI is critical to organizational growth and operational efficiency.

Gartner defines this class of integrated software technologies as business orchestration and automation technologies because they are important for driving consolidated business orchestration and automation. A workflow engine is an essential part of any process orchestration and automation framework, so we want to ensure Camunda’s Zeebe advanced workflow engine has the availability and scalability necessary to support the evolution of complex, enterprise-scale, intelligent automation systems.

Second, we want to confirm that we are developing the best technology to support our customers.

Increasingly, our customers are modernizing their architectures to empower use cases with numerous process instances that require high-throughput, high-performance workflow processing. Example use cases include real-time payments, stock trade matching and settlement, compliance checks, end-of-day asset balancing, bulk ordering, and merchant payment batch clearing.

We want to demonstrate that Camunda’s advanced workflow engine can support high-volume workflows with low latency, can scale as needed, and is a resilient system for handling errors and failovers in real time. Through benchmarking, we can also help our customers find the right configurations to optimize their automations.

How we built a benchmark generator

Camunda’s team faced a challenge: no common testing software measured the criteria we wanted to benchmark. Traditional load testing frameworks did not provide a way to test and measure the balance of process instance starts and service task completions. Camunda cofounder Bernd Ruecker explained this problem in a previous blog on the team’s journey to build a benchmark tool.

As a solution, our team built a benchmark generator in Java that runs on Kubernetes and simulates the workload that real Zeebe clients might generate against the engine. It combines a “starter” application that pushes API requests to the Zeebe cluster and a “worker” application for completing service tasks.

The tool includes a balancing algorithm that tries to find the optimal rate of process instance starts by starting projects at a given rate and adjusting the rate based on backpressure. Metrics are exposed in Prometheus and displayed in prebuilt Grafana dashboards.

To reduce the need for a lot of hardware resources, the team used asynchronous/reactive programming, which allows the generator to use a small machine to utilize even large Zeebe clusters.

Our testing methodology

The design of the benchmark generator allows us to test different modes. For example, we can test a solid workload and then ramp up the load to overload the system until backpressure prevents the system from completing any work. It’s an approach that allows us to find a breaking point and test potential reconfigurations to optimize performance.

In his presentation, Falko explains, “When we did the testing, we found ourselves starting to record different configurations and playing with different variations of Zeebe settings to find the right performance.” One test might be configured for 2,000 process instances per second. The next test might include adjustments to the size of the Zeebe cluster or other parameters.

To track the different configurations and variations, the team created a massive spreadsheet that captures all the configuration parameters and test results.

Zeebe Benchmark Template
Example of Camunda’s dynamic benchmarking spreadsheet

By adding automations to the sheet, each row becomes a configuration that can be executed. The sheet essentially starts the benchmarking tests, connecting with the workflow engine through an app called Zeebe Tuner, which generates values for the Camunda Helm Chart and drives the load generator to run the test.

Iterative Benchmark Setup with Zeebe Tuner
Diagram of Camunda’s iterative benchmarking setup

This framework allows us to efficiently iterate test configurations and change one parameter at a time to evaluate and optimize performance. It also allows us to run tests unattended.

Benchmarking results

To give you an idea of the type of output we can generate through our benchmarking generator, the series of images below shows results from a hack week where the team focused on low latency requirements. The images illustrate the result of improvements made over the entire week by reconfiguring parameters in the spreadsheet to tune the engine.

Message Throughput and Backpressure
The graph’s left-hand side shows how throughput (in grey) was improved by reconfiguring engine parameters to eliminate backpressure (in blue).
Process Instance Duration (Latency)
The graph shows the potential of the workflow engine and the reduction of latency through various parameter reconfigurations.
Job Streaming: PI Duration -56%
The graph on the left shows output before the introduction of job streaming. The graph on the right shows the effect of job streaming on reducing process instance duration.

Benchmarking lessons learned

“If you have a high-performance workload and you’re wondering if Camunda can handle it, then we have proven more than once that we are horizontally scalable.”
– Falko Menge, Senior Principal Solution Architect at Camunda

The benchmark generator gives engineers the ability to play with different variables and find the optimal configuration for each client’s use case and needs. It also helps us identify and prioritize potential areas where performance can be improved. For example, tests focused on process instance duration helped identify ways to reduce the duration through job streaming.

Key takeaway: The importance of job streaming

Job streaming is how the jobs arrive at the client. Through benchmarking, we could visualize the relationship between larger numbers of partitions and diminishing returns on job activation and saw how a mode called job streaming reduces process instance duration.

Job streaming mode allows brokers to autonomously assign jobs to clients in real time by enabling brokers to recognize which clients are connected to the system. In our tests, we also found that job streaming reduced CPU usage on the Zeebe cluster by 50%, which is significant. Based on benchmarking, our recommendation is organizations that require high performance use job streaming mode as a default.

Dive deeper into Camunda’s benchmarking data

Falko also shared with the CamundaCon audience his findings related to predictable scalability, price performance for Zeebe brokers, and engine tuning best practices. Download his slides and watch the conference replay to see the breakdown of our latest benchmarking test data in detail.

For more details on how to optimize Camunda for your organization, check out Jothi Viswanathan’s blog on performance tuning end-to-end solutions in Camunda 8, or connect with a Camunda consultant.

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AI Tools and Process Orchestration, the Perfect Match for Developers https://camunda.com/blog/2025/01/ai-tools-process-orchestration-perfect-match-developers/ Fri, 24 Jan 2025 21:02:10 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=127427 A few suggestions for adding development AI tools into the process orchestration mix.

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Process orchestration and automation tools have become indispensable for developers looking to automate and streamline time-consuming human workflows, transform robotic process automation, and optimize process intelligence and analytics. Tools like Camunda enable the integration and coordination of various processes and microservices, making complex deployments more manageable. However, by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and applications in conjunction with process orchestration, developers can further enhance efficiency, reduce errors, and accelerate development cycles.

Let’s explore a few useful AI tools and functions that synergize well with process orchestration tools to simplify developers’ lives.

AI-powered monitoring and analytics

One key area where AI tools can aid developers is monitoring and analytics. AI-driven monitoring tools like Dynatrace, New Relic, and Datadog use machine learning algorithms to analyze application performance data as it happens. They can predict potential issues before they impact the system, allowing developers to address them proactively. When integrated with process orchestration tools like Camunda, these AI-powered monitors can trigger automated workflows to scale resources or initiate recovery processes, ensuring high availability and optimal performance without manual intervention.

NB: Camunda 8 will soon introduce a new feature where completed process instances are archived directly in Camunda Zeebe. This change simplifies installation, means less manual configuration of The Archiver, and enhances scalability and replication by utilizing Zeebe’s partitions. Zeebe is optimized for high performance and is well-suited for distributed systems and environments with heavy workloads.

Automated code reviews and quality checks

Tools like DeepCode and Codacy use AI to perform automated code reviews and enforce coding standards. These platforms scan code repositories for security vulnerabilities, bugs, and quality issues, providing real-time feedback to developers. When integrated with process orchestration platforms like Camunda, these automated quality checks can be incorporated into the deployment pipelines. This ensures that only high-quality code is moved through to production environments.

NB: Camunda offers offer CI/CD with Git Sync, and a blueprint that replaces an organization’s CI/CD pipeline with Camunda. A CI/CD pipeline is a series of automated processes that streamline the software development lifecycle:

  • Continuous integration (CI): Developers regularly merge code changes into a central repository.
  • Continuous delivery (CD) or continuous deployment: The application is automatically released to its intended environment.

AI tools for predictive resource management

AI can also significantly improve resource allocation and cost management within orchestrated environments. Tools like Google Cloud’s Recommender and AWS Compute Optimizer use machine learning to investigate usage patterns and recommend optimal resource configurations. By integrating these recommendations into orchestration tools like Camunda, developers can automate the provisioning of Cloud resources, ensuring that applications always have the resources they need while minimizing costs.

NB: A recent feature in Camunda Optimize lets you export organized and pre-processed data into a single dataset, making it easier to perform advanced analysis and enable machine learning predictions for process instances. The enhanced raw data reports now include additional columns, providing details like incident counts and user task numbers, which can help predict instances’ completion time.

Natural language processing for documentation

Documentation is critical, yet so often time-consuming, as a part of the development process. Let’s face it: anything that increases available dev time, and lets teams get on with what’s important, is a plus. AI tools leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) can automatically generate and update documentation based on code changes and project updates. For instance, tools like Doxygen and Swagger can be leveraged to run automatically during the build process, ensuring that documentation stays in sync with the codebase without manual effort from developers.

Chatbots for operational efficiency

AI-powered chatbots, such as Slack’s built-in bots or Hubot, can be integrated with orchestration tools to provide developers with an interactive interface for managing workflows. Developers can issue commands and receive notifications about their orchestrated processes directly within their communication platform of choice, streamlining operations and allowing for quicker responses to issues.

NB: Camunda offers a chatbot with Modeler that provides information about the documentation and, with BPMN Copilot, even more AI assistance. Camunda subscribers can also implement Connectors to do this. Camunda also makes use of an AI chatbot interface to quickly surface information from our own docs.

The fusion of AI tools and applications with process orchestration tools offers developers a powerful combination to enhance their productivity and the reliability of their systems. AI can significantly reduce the manual burden on development teams by automating routine tasks, predicting and addressing potential issues, and optimizing resources. As these technologies evolve, we can expect even more sophisticated integrations to revolutionize further how developers build and deploy software.

As development teams and organizations embrace these AI-enhanced orchestration capabilities, the future of software development will be more efficient, intelligent, and responsive to the rapidly changing market demands. The key to success is carefully selecting tools that integrate seamlessly with existing development workflows and enterprise orchestration platforms like Camunda.

How to use AI tools effectively

Here are a few steps developers can take to harness the full potential of AI tools in process orchestration:

  1. Assess your workflow
    Begin by evaluating your current development and deployment processes. Identify bottlenecks, repetitive tasks, and areas prone to errors. This will help you understand where AI tools can provide the most value.
  2. Choose complementary tools
    Select AI tools that complement and integrate well with your process orchestration and automation platform. Ensure these tools have robust APIs and support the programming languages or frameworks you use. Compatibility is crucial for a smooth integration.
  3. Start small and scale
    Implement AI tools incrementally. Start with one or two key areas, such as automated code reviews or predictive resource management. Once you’ve gauged their effectiveness and worked out any kinks, you can expand their use across other aspects of your processes.
  4. Train your team
    Ensure your development team is well-versed in the capabilities and usage of the selected AI tools. Proper training will enable them to effectively leverage these tools and integrate them into their daily work.
  5. Monitor and optimize
    Continuously monitor the performance and impact of AI tools on your workflow. Use the insights gained to fine-tune configurations and optimize processes. AI tools often improve with more data and use, so expect improvements over time.
  6. Stay updated
    The field of AI is rapidly advancing. Keep abreast of the latest developments in AI tools and process orchestration. By staying updated, you can take advantage of new features and capabilities as they emerge.
  7. Encourage feedback and innovation
    Encourage your team to provide feedback on the AI tools in use. Developers are the end-users and will have firsthand insights into the practical benefits and limitations. Foster a culture of innovation where team members can suggest or even develop new AI integrations that could benefit your workflows.

Incorporating AI into process orchestration is not a one-time event but an ongoing journey. As AI technologies evolve, seemingly moving the goalposts daily, so will how they can be applied to streamline development processes. However, developers and organizations can stay on the competitive edge by keeping an open mind and continually exploring new AI integrations.

Combining AI and process orchestration promises a future where developers can focus more on creative problem-solving and less on routine tasks. With the right tools and approach, developers can create a synergistic ecosystem that accelerates development and enhances the quality and reliability of software products.

For more information on Camunda’s AI-enabled process orchestration capabilities and how organizations can realize AI’s full potential across their enterprise, please contact us for a no-obligation demonstration.

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Transforming Legacy Workflows at The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance https://camunda.com/blog/2025/01/transforming-legacy-workflows-norfolk-dedham-group-insurance/ Fri, 17 Jan 2025 19:45:17 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=126403 Shashi Ayachitam, IT Director at The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance, spoke to us about the significant overhaul of its claims solution and the benefits of replacing its outdated legacy workflow system with Camunda.

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At CamundaCon NYC in October 2024, Shashidar Ayachitam, IT Director from The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance, spoke to us about the company’s journey in updating its legacy workflow tools.

In his presentation, he discussed how embracing a modern process orchestration and automation tool like Camunda can lead to remarkable organizational change and set the stage for future growth. Shashidar (Shashi) shares their transformative journey from an outdated BPM tool to a Camunda-centered architecture, enhancing its claims processes and customer interactions with increased efficiency, visibility, compliance, and customization, all while delivering the exceptional customer service that customers now expect as standard.

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CamundaCon allows fellow industry professionals and thought leaders to exchange practical insights and tactics, discover helpful hints and techniques, and participate in workshops, lectures, and process orchestration and automation events throughout the conference. If you’d like to know more, regardless of your familiarity with the Camunda community or process orchestration and automation, please check out our upcoming local and national events.

The challenge of outdated systems

The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance, boasting a rich history of 200 years, recognized that its old workflow system, established in 2004, was no longer adequate. The company’s legacy platform, responsible for approximately 650 essential workflows, was suddenly left without support when another provider acquired it. As a result, the outdated and unsupported system posed a security threat and hindered the efficiency of the customer experience due to its lack of a viable upgrade option.

Its tightly coupled architecture was now preventing the flexibility needed for the company’s future growth in the competitive, customer-centric, and agile insurance arena.

Legacy and outdated systems can be negative for process automation and orchestration best practices because they can lead to a number of challenges, including but not limited to:

  • Decreased productivity: System downtime can lead to lost customers and decreased team member efficiency.
  • Expensive maintenance: Outdated systems are more likely to fail, which can make them expensive to fix and maintain, and it is difficult to recruit staff with the knowledge to maintain custom or dated solutions.
  • Frequent outages: Outdated software is less likely to be reliable and may break more often.
  • Incompatibility: When older systems are combined with newer ones, issues such as data inconsistencies, system incompatibilities, and workflow disruptions can arise, leading to inefficiencies and potential downtime. Outdated data can cause disruptions and delays in process.
  • Compliance: Compliance requirements often require the use of up-to-date and secure software.
  • Lack of support: As communities move to newer technologies, support for older ones decreases, increasing the risk of security failure and without a clear upgrade route.
  • Stuck in the past: Future-proofing process orchestration is crucial to ensure an organization’s workflows remain agile, scalable, and adaptable to evolving technological advancements and market demands, thereby maintaining operational efficiency and competitive edge over time.

According to Shashi, the need for modernization was clear and critical, and the company required a robust, API-driven, and decoupled orchestration and automation solution to modernize its claims operations, underwriting, and customer support and through which to incorporate helpful emerging technologies like AI.

The Camunda solution

After thorough consideration and proof-of-concept trials, Camunda stood out as the solution of choice due to its maturity, scalability, and flexibility. Adopting a microservices architecture, The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance could ensure seamless interactions and prepare for future technological shifts.

“We built customized components and deployed them quickly. The benefits we are witnessing from these are substantial. The Operate analytics are astounding, providing daily insights that have led to strategic and tactical decisions.”
Shashi Ayachitam, IT Director, The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance.

Camunda offers decoupled orchestration through its remote workflow engine, which can be provisioned and configured separately from the application and process solution. This decoupling allows for a number of benefits, including:

  • Independent scaling: The workflow engine can be scaled without affecting the application code.
  • Easier troubleshooting: Issues can be easily identified in one component, and vulnerabilities are not spread to other components. 
  • Software as a service: The workflow engine can be operated as a service, either in a public cloud or as an in-house service. 
  • Local application development: Applications can connect remotely to the workflow engine, allowing for local or on-premise development.

Camunda is a process orchestration and automation platform that helps organizations design, automate, and improve processes and business rules. It plays a significant role in decoupling applications and processes in the following ways:

  • Process engine abstraction: Camunda provides a process engine that acts as a layer of abstraction between business processes and the applications that perform the tasks within those processes. By defining processes in BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) and decisions in DMN (Decision Model and Notation), Camunda allows you to change and manage processes without modifying the underlying applications.
  • Microservices orchestration: Camunda can orchestrate microservices by sending signals to start or complete tasks. This allows individual microservices to remain loosely coupled and focused on their specific functionality while the Camunda engine manages the state and order of process execution.
  • External task pattern: Camunda supports the External Task pattern, where services outside the process engine handle long-running or resource-intensive tasks. These external tasks communicate with the process engine to fetch and complete work items. This decouples task execution from the workflow engine and allows different applications to work on tasks independently.
  • Event-driven architecture: With Camunda, you can implement an event-driven architecture that triggers processes in response to events. Applications can publish events without being aware of the internal details of the processes they activate, thus decoupling the event producers from the process consumers.
  • REST API and message queues: Camunda provides REST APIs and can integrate with message queues (like AMQP, Kafka, etc.), allowing applications to interact with the process engine without being directly linked. Applications can push and pull information from the process engine as needed, decoupling them from each other and the engine itself.
  • Versioning and deployment: Camunda allows for versioning of process definitions. This means that new versions of a process can be deployed without affecting running instances of older versions. Applications can continue to operate with the process version they were designed for, providing a clear upgrade path without tightly coupling the application lifecycle to the process lifecycle.

By leveraging these features, Camunda enables organizations to maintain a clear separation between their business processes and the applications that support them, facilitating easier maintenance, scalability, and adaptability to change.

The results are in

In his presentation, Shashi discusses how the implementation of Camunda brought immediate and significant improvements:

  • Processing time: Claim processing time was reduced by 35%, enhancing operational efficiency.
  • Cost savings: Costs per claim lowered by 30%, contributing to financial health.
  • Scalability: The solution facilitated expansion into new business areas and adaptability for further growth.

We cut down 35% of the time in processing the claims and reduced 30% cost per claim since we went live with Camunda.”
Shashi Ayachitam, IT Director, The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance.

Strategic partnerships cement success

To aid in development and implementation, The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance engaged with Camunda Platinum Partner NTConsult. Their expertise was invaluable to the successful transition. Shashi cites Camunda and NTConsult’s unwavering support as an invaluable part of the development and implementation process.

“There won’t be any disappointment [with Camunda]. We like it and will continue using Camunda and have NTConsult as our strategic partners for a long time.”
Shashi Ayachitam, IT Director, The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance.

Streamlined processes have led to quicker resolutions, improved customer satisfaction, and provided a wealth of actionable insights, enabling better decision-making and IT efficiency. The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance plans to extend Camunda’s functionalities to underwriting and customer support. Additionally, they are exploring the integration of AI to enhance process automation further.

We also spoke to Shashi behind the scenes at CamundaCon NYC ‘24, where he candidly discussed their experience and the positive changes that implementing Camunda has afforded his team.

The presentation by Shashi Ayachitam illustrates the transformative power of Camunda’s process orchestration and automation capabilities, something we’re proud to bring to thousands of companies around the world (and even in space). This strategic move has not only resolved current operational challenges for The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance but has also opened doors to new possibilities, ensuring the company remains agile and competitive in the ever-evolving and fiercely competitive insurance market.

Learn more

To learn more about the journey of The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance, you can read their full case study here.

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U.S. Bank Implements Microapp Architecture and Camunda for Efficiency, Flexibility, and Scalability https://camunda.com/blog/2025/01/u-s-bank-implements-microapp-architecture-and-camunda/ Tue, 07 Jan 2025 20:16:50 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=125606 At CamundaCon 2024, Prashant Appikatla talked about leveraging microapps with Camunda for case management best practices.

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At the forefront of financial innovation, U.S. Bank has embarked on a transformative journey. At CamundaCon NYC 2024, Prashant Appikatla, software engineer and assistant vice president at U.S. Bank, took to the stage to bring us his insights into the implementation of microapp architecture to address complex orchestration solutions for various business lines.

Prashant presents a compelling case study into how U.S. Bank tackled efficiency roadblocks in centralized infrastructure management. Adopting a microservices approach, they used Camunda for process orchestration and automation, and microapps for individual functions and features.

U.S. Bank is an American banking powerhouse headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As the fifth largest commercial bank in the US, it offers a wide array of financial services to a diverse clientele, ranging from personal banking to complex financial solutions for businesses and governmental entities. Last year, it was 149 on the Fortune 500 list and was recognized as a systemically important financial institution by the Financial Stability Board (FSB).

By leveraging microapp architecture and orchestration and automation, the bank is setting new standards for efficiency, flexibility, and scalability in the banking and financial services industry.

The need for agility

The software engineering and IT team at U.S. Bank were tasked with a formidable challenge: managing a centralized infrastructure that simultaneously meets the specific requirements of assorted internal business units and customer-facing functions.

The traditional system required individualized templates or applications per business line, leading to mounting inefficiencies and a disjointed approach. This system also lacked the agility needed to keep pace with the ever-changing regulatory pressures and dynamics of the financial sector.

Microapp architecture and Camunda

Prashant, along with his team, recognized the potential in microapps—tiny, independent applications dedicated to executing a single task or function. In his presentation, he discusses how they advocated for an innovative architecture that would harness both horizontal and vertical microapp structures.

This meant having microapps work in concert for collective functions (horizontal) and having them execute distinct, standalone features (vertical).

The team integrated microapp architecture into their case management system using Camunda, streamlining the process for customer disputes and improving the overall customer experience. Customers can now initiate dispute processes through user-friendly apps connected with backend microservices—a harmonized deployment model designed to serve more diverse business needs with minimal adjustments.

In his presentation, Prashant speaks about how the transition to microapp architecture, with Camunda, saw the creation of specialized microapps for functions such as processing disputes and managing case attachments. This new system empowered U.S. Bank with the ability to seamlessly handle disputes, attach evidence, and integrate services much more efficiently.

During the implementation, the team overcame issues such as ensuring communication between microapps without creating dependencies, addressing latency and complexities during maintenance, and managing the repercussions of individual microapp failures on the overall system.

Prashant also discusses how they introduced feature flagging to dynamically respond to any operational issues, thus maintaining service continuity.

Microapp benefits and Camunda integration

According to Prashant, the adoption of microapp architecture delivered several significant advantages to U.S. Bank:

  1. Efficiency: Quick templating for business lines meant expedited responses to customer demands.
  2. Scalability: The system could easily integrate new microapps, promoting growth and flexibility.
  3. Flexibility: Independent development and deployment of microapps led to quicker iterations and shorter time-to-market for new services.
  4. Orchestration: Camunda’s integration facilitated microservices orchestration, offering real-time process management, real-time process observability and troubleshooting, and enhanced data connectivity.

U.S. Bank’s swing to microapp architecture has reshaped their infrastructure management approach, yielding a system that is flexible, scalable, and efficient. Prashant discusses how business units now benefit from speedier, more customized solutions, and the central team can oversee the system with improved control.

This successful architecture sets the stage for future advancements and AI-enabled process orchestration, ensuring that U.S. Bank remains a Fortune 500 leader in innovation and customer-centric service.

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Unlocking the Full Potential of AI in Process Orchestration https://camunda.com/blog/2024/12/unlocking-the-full-potential-of-ai-in-process-orchestration/ Tue, 24 Dec 2024 18:08:11 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=125424 Where are we now, and what does the future hold for AI through process orchestration?

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While the promises of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are often discussed with sincere and fervent enthusiasm, the reality of implementing these advanced technologies can be daunting for many organizations. AI is a game changer and a force multiplier, but how can we add AI to our organizational processes without falling prey to hype, errors, invisible elements, and lax standards?

This is where the concept of process orchestration comes into play, serving as the critical framework for successfully integrating AI into business operations.

The pivotal role of orchestration in AI implementation

Orchestration ensures a well-structured and seamless integration of AI into our business processes. Imagine process orchestration as the conductor of an orchestra, harmonizing various instruments (or, in this case, business processes and AI tools) to create a symphony of efficiency and productivity.

As businesses strive to make the leap from the theoretical potential of AI to practical, tangible benefits, they’re going to encounter hurdles. A study by HFS research projects a significant rise in business adoption with an increase in AI investment from 19% to 31% over the next two years, underscoring a broader industry shift toward data-driven and AI-centric transformations.

However, while executives may plan to scale up general AI usage, many are hindered by a lack of concrete use cases and a strategic plan.

The advantages of combining AI with process orchestration

If process orchestration is the conductor of an orchestra, Camunda is the maestro. As a process orchestration and automation tool, Camunda’s AI-driven process orchestration offers organizations an unparalleled advantage in visibility and consistency across their workflows.

By centralizing the coordination of tasks that involve multiple systems and ensuring work is allocated efficiently, Camunda provides the transparency necessary to pinpoint the most impactful use cases for automation.

Camunda’s platform delivers real-time data and insights, further empowering organizations to identify bottlenecks and optimize operations based on solid evidence. For example, when it comes to email management, using AI with Camunda can drastically reduce the time spent sorting through thousands of emails with its intelligent triage and classification capabilities—akin to a digital sorting hat.

Camunda offers a variety of pre-built AI agents and the tools to create custom agents.

The possibilities for process development with AI are virtually unlimited. For example, an AI agent can analyze a customer relationship management (CRM) system and other customer data to automatically generate profiles for any know-your-customer (KYC) initiative—a set of policies and procedures that financial institutions must use to verify the identity of their customers and ensure they are acting legally.

Additionally, AI routers can intelligently route incoming data, streamlining your processes. If a customer isn’t automatically validated, a manual review step could be included in a KYC scenario. However, this step can be automated or eliminated, enabling the AI agent to operate independently.

Using Camunda, organizations can integrate AI agents into business processes (designed with BPMN) to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. Camunda’s flexible and intelligent platform allows organizations to select the best AI agents for their needs and individual use cases, paving the way to superior and optimized business automation.

Camunda’s AI process orchestration features

Camunda’s standardized modeling language and AI-powered Copilot accelerate the journey to optimized operations. By harnessing the power of suggestions from Modeler and accelerating workflow design with the AI-assisted Form Builder, businesses can enhance productivity for IT and business users, leading to improved alignment and cooperation.

Camunda goes beyond simply automating processes; it enables a holistic approach by integrating AI services and machine learning models into end-to-end business processes. With out-of-the-box AI connectors and AI-enabled blueprints, organizations can adapt more rapidly to changes in customer expectations, market conditions, and regulatory standards, regardless of industry.

Transformative insights and continuous improvement

Camunda’s AI doesn’t stop at execution. It offers intelligent execution and optimization by combining machine learning algorithms with process execution data to reveal hidden insights and trends. This enables companies to streamline operations, reduce costs, and continually improve customer experiences.

Camunda’s AI and process orchestration tools aren’t just about keeping pace with the competition; they are about leading the charge toward operational excellence and offering business customers minimum friction toward success.

By establishing a strong foundation with process orchestration and leveraging the power of AI, businesses can realize the full potential of a technology that is enabling machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem-solving, decision-making, creativity, and autonomy, transforming their processes with intelligence, agility, and adaptability—now and for a sustainable business future.

If you’d like to learn more about Camunda’s AI process orchestration features and AI enablement advantage, please contact us for a no-obligation demonstration.

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Embracing Process Orchestration in the Digital Transformation Journey of Rabobank https://camunda.com/blog/2024/12/rabobank-transforms-the-banking-customer-experience/ Wed, 18 Dec 2024 22:57:06 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=125098 Rabobank transforms the banking customer experience with Camunda 8 SaaS.

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A smooth and friction-free customer experience is essential to capture and maintain clientele. With a slew of alternatives out there, a prospect should feel that their onboarding and general service meets their expectations and addresses their concerns.

Staying ahead of the curve and providing customers with a smooth banking experience, plus adhering to regulatory standards and best practices, isn’t just a competitive advantage; it’s a critical necessity expected by modern customers.

Process orchestration is crucial for banking services—it streamlines operations, can greatly enhance the customer experience, helps ensure regulatory compliance, and accelerates the delivery of financial products to market with outstanding ROI.

96% of IT professionals consider process automation to be essential to digital transformation, and Rabobank, the leading Dutch multinational bank, recognized this imperative.

They found themselves struggling with slow process optimization and rigid systems due to frontend embedded process logic. This resulted in inefficiencies in sales and customer onboarding, as well as challenges in meeting regulatory demands. To address these issues and modernize its legacy systems, Rabobank recently implemented Camunda 8 SaaS for smarter automation orchestration.

To talk to us about their journey, Rabobank business analyst Pascal van Puijvelde and IT lead Louwris Wernink joined us at CamundaCon NYC 2024.

In their presentation, they talk about how the IT team grappled with slow production times , under their old system, its rigid processes, and the misalignment between business and IT. This impacted their ability to run sales and customer onboarding processes efficiently and to adhere to essential regulatory requirements. Pascal and Louwris spoke to us about their adoption of Camunda 8 as a result of their need to orchestrate automation intelligently, and to modernize legacy systems. They explained how SaaS is the right answer for them to set up their team for success while complying with banking regulations.

The genesis of change

With a legacy system that was becoming increasingly obsolete, Rabobank faced the challenge of revamping its IT infrastructure to improve efficiency and reduce loan approval times.

After careful consideration of various platforms, including Mendix, Pega, and serverless options, Rabobank chose Camunda for its agility, scalability, and seamless integration capabilities.

Strategic implementation

Rabobank managed the implementation of Camunda by providing customized training for various roles, establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) for ongoing support and best practices sharing, and conducting regular meetings to address challenges. Additionally, they promoted incremental learning and utilized technical account managers from Camunda for expert advice, ensuring a well-supported transition for all team members.

The bank worked closely with Camunda’s dedicated technical account managers (TAMs) to refine its initial designs and overcome process modeling challenges, to centralize knowledge, to share best practices, and to foster innovation.

“There is a lot of interest across the business. We have an internal Rabobank community around Camunda, which is starting to grow. We really don’t have to sell it internally. There is a lot of discovery going on, and the need for orchestration is out there.”
Louwris Wernink, IT Lead, Rabobank

A comprehensive training sprint was also conducted across multiple roles within the organization to ensure smooth adoption and enablement of the new platform.

“Having a BPMN approach gives us more insight into business requirements in an earlier stage, but also where the complexity is where we need some more fine-grained details on requirements. You get closer to the actual complexity that you have to build.”
Pascal van Puijvelde, Business Analyst, Rabobank

Navigating challenges with finesse

Adhering to stringent banking regulations, the Rabobank team talked about how they negotiated SLAs and ensured data security and privacy were uncompromised during the transition to Camunda.

The bank developed a structured approach to manage the increase of information during the implementation phase, ensuring that each team member was adequately trained and supported and received the support needed to adapt to the new system.

The SaaS solution has allowed Rabobank to focus on enhancing customer experiences rather than infrastructure administration.

“For quite some time, SaaS has been the favorite solution for us. We want to focus on the fun stuff, and that for us is creating that customer experience and not running a Kubernetes cluster. Do what you’re good at—leave the rest to Camunda.”
Pascal van Puijvelde, Business Analyst, Rabobank

The road ahead

Rabobank established process KPIs to measure the impact of Camunda on time-to-market and overall efficiency, expecting in excess of a 30% improvement in their development cycles.

“Our time-to-market was too long. With Camunda 8, we expect to reduce this by at least 30%. That means going from a year to around 6-8 months, and when each sprint currently costs around €50,000, it soon adds up if you’re fast.”
Pascal van Puijvelde, Business Analyst, Rabobank

As the journey progresses, Rabobank continues to refine its processes, aiming for a library of reusable components, leveraging AI-enable process orchestration in the future, and optimizing their orchestration for even greater customer satisfaction.

Rabobank’s presentation and journey with Camunda are a testimony of the power of embracing digital transformation in the banking sector through leveraging process orchestration and automation—leading to a competitive advantage and critical necessity that users expect.

Rabobank is a cooperative bank with a mission, having been dedicated to creating a future-proof society and tackling major societal challenges for 125 years. A critical part of this is trust and the customer experience. By thoughtfully integrating a new process orchestration platform, the bank has positioned itself for heightened agility, successfully circumnavigated negative regulatory scrutiny, improved customer service, and served its customers in the way they expect services to be delivered, and sustained growth.

After their presentation, Louwris and Pascal joined us for an informal chat as a part of our ongoing Conversations with Friends and Customers series for 2024/25. In their behind-the-scenes interview, they spoke further about their Camunda 8 journey, their plans for the future with AI integration, why SaaS was the right choice for them, and how Rabobank’s IT department can now run €5.4 million worth of sales processes and support six million customers per year with Camunda.

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Capital One Streamlines Risk Management with Camunda Modeler https://camunda.com/blog/2024/12/capital-one-streamlines-risk-management-with-camunda-modeler/ Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:06:07 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=124386 Camunda Modeler modernized Capital One's risk management workflows with BPMN process models and DMN decision tables.

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Capital One specializes in credit cards, auto loans, banking, and savings accounts. Headquartered in Tysons, Virginia, it is a finance leader and high-street name in the United States, Canada, and the UK. For this direct bank, credit card issuer, and auto loan originator with over 100 million customers and 50,000 associates, risk management is a regulatory requirement and a strategic imperative for the business.

In 2014, the company embarked on a journey to revolutionize its risk management framework, driven by the capabilities of cloud computing. By 2016, Capital One became the first bank to declare a full migration to the cloud, and by 2020, it had exited all of its data centers, embracing a tech-forward identity.

As Sean Webb, product manager at Capital One, explained during their presentation at CamundaCon NYC 2024, managing risk is a crucial best practice for any financial organization, but it is especially so for an organization so large and in such a highly regulated field.

Risk management involves identifying, evaluating, and mitigating threats to an organization’s finances, earnings, and operations arising from financial, legal, technological, strategic, accidental, or natural risks. It aims to address the full spectrum of potential risks and their interconnected effects on an organization’s strategic objectives.

As you can imagine, it is a discipline of dependencies, contingencies, automated and manual processes, compliance and regulatory requirements, stimulus and response, and constant vigilance. As Sean noted, risk management is often decentralized across an entire company, and centralizing it has benefits and challenges.

Choosing Camunda

Senthilkumar Manokaran, application architect and master software engineer at Capital One, spoke about the best-in-class requirements critical for a risk management platform. The organization had very specific requirements around process and task management, decision management, optimization capabilities, multi-tenancy, and more. They looked to see if anything in the market already met these requirements, and found Camunda.

Central to Capital One’s modernization was the integration of Camunda’s process and decision automation tool, Modeler. This tool enabled the risk management team to centralize their workflows and decision-making processes, establishing a unified language across diverse teams, from assessors to auditors. This shift was not merely about technology but also about culture and practice. Their presentation cites how Capital One’s journey highlights the importance of a shared responsibility model—a collaboration between a central platform team and various tenant teams who could independently build and deploy their processes, leveraging the innate benefits of Camunda Modeler.

The central team became a hub of expertise, offering guidance, templates, and best practices to ensure consistency and efficiency across the organization. This model facilitated rapid scaling, reduced latency, and helped maintain a coherent experience throughout the organization’s risk management activities.

Leveraging process orchestration

Capital One’s process orchestration journey started with building out core risk management activities within the application stack. The company then centralized these processes and rules for faster, uniform decisions. This approach meant that the organization could respond more quickly to change, with the benefit of associates focusing more on risk management instead of the logistics and administration surrounding that management.

During their presentation Q&A, Sean highlighted the ongoing benefits of Camunda Modeler: “It’s great that we can directly collaborate on the model itself, live, and adjust these things quickly. We’ve had testing sessions where we’re testing our product, and we find rules that aren’t functioning the way that we thought they would, then made the change in the DMN table so quickly that we had it fixed by the end of the testing session. Then we’re able to retest it, right there!”

The benefits of modernization

“Our tech and business effectiveness improved after automating our processes using Camunda. Increased business value, speed to market, and tech efficiency. Overall cost reduction. Plus, using Camunda greatly reduced the need for custom code, decreased infrastructure costs, and streamlined compliance with non-functional requirements.”
Sean Webb, Product Manager, Capital One

The benefits of Capital One’s modernization were manifold. There was a notable increase in speed to market, with Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) diagrams becoming tools for collaboration between business, product, and tech teams. Citing significant ROI, this collaboration allowed for live model adjustments, significantly reducing the time from design to implementation.

“We noticed an instant increase in our speed to market as we started to use Camunda. And it reduces cost as well—infrastructure-wise. Now, it’s consolidated. It’s sitting in a serverless tech stack, which greatly saves our infrastructure maintenance costs.” 
Senthilkumar Manokaran, Master Software Engineer, Capital One

Challenges and lessons learned

The journey was not without its challenges. The team learned the importance of establishing templates and standards for process models to avoid discrepancies. In their presentation they recognize the need for thorough documentation, which grew to be extensive enough to enable self-service for tenant teams. Data retention policies were implemented to manage the accumulation of data, and the team continuously adapted to new changes, setting best practices along the way.

Looking to tomorrow

Capital One’s journey in risk management modernization showcases an inspiring and successful blend of technological innovation and strategic planning. In their CamundaCon NYC presentation, Sean and Senthilkumar discuss how, by leveraging Camunda’s platform, the company not only enhanced its efficiency and agility but also fostered a culture of collaboration and continuous learning.

As they look to the future, with AI-powered automation and integration on the horizon, Capital One continues to solidify its stance as “a technology company that is also a bank,” setting a precedent and trend for the financial industry at large.

Please watch their CamundaCon presentation for more details on this project, and check out some of the other presentations from CamundaCon New York City 2024 for more invaluable real-world insights from the process orchestration trenches.

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