Christian Connors, Author at Camunda https://camunda.com Workflow and Decision Automation Platform Sat, 30 Mar 2024 17:09:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://camunda.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Secondary-Logo_Rounded-Black-150x150.png Christian Connors, Author at Camunda https://camunda.com 32 32 Community Conversations: Jean Robert Alves, Agi https://camunda.com/blog/2022/06/community-conversations-jean-robert-alves-agibank/ Thu, 02 Jun 2022 13:57:04 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=56009 For the latest installment of Community Conversations, we sat down with Jean Robert Alves, a Camunda Champion and software architect expert at Agi.

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For developers, enterprise architects, and other business professionals who utilize process automation technology, there is no limit to the potential use cases. With organizations implementing process automation in so many unique ways, there is a wealth of knowledge to be found from experts around the world. The Camunda Community is comprised of a collaborative group of individuals who answer questions, speak at events, publish content, and participate in online communities. These community members represent the heartbeat of Camunda, and they’re constantly finding ways to improve the strategy, implementation, and outcomes of process automation.

For the latest installment of our Community Conversations blog series, we sat down with Jean Robert Alves, a Camunda Champion and software architect expert at Agi, a digital bank based in Brazil. We caught up with Alves to learn more about his history with Camunda, his experience as a Champion, and the session he hosted at this year’s Camunda Community Summit. 

Q: When and how did your relationship with Camunda begin?

Alves: “Well, my story with Camunda started when my story with Agi also started. In 2017, I was working for another company, and Agibank made a partnership with us to start using BPM. So I was the one sent to start this architecture. In 2019, I was directly hired by Agi to help teams with implementing and using BPM and I continue to do this today.

Q: What issue(s) was your organization originally hoping to solve with Camunda?  

Alves: “When I came to Agi, there was already some process to sell products like current accounts, loans, etc., but it was all written in code. There was no living documentation like what we have now with BPM. I guess we were lucky to have such nice people who remembered the details and helped me a lot with designing these many processes as BPM diagrams. So I can say that our main problem was the visibility and organization of our business data and logic.” 

Q: How did you deal with these challenges before deploying Camunda?  

Alves: “As I said before, we had our code and documentation, which became old and outdated very quickly, as our code keeps evolving. Our strength was having teams with really nice people and experts in their business.” 

Q: How did Camunda help solve those issues?

Alves: “Well, as we started to build diagrams with BPM, I felt that I could finally communicate with developers and business people using the same language. It’s like showing some part of your code in a business meeting, but in a language that everyone can understand and even help us to improve it with their experience. And then, automating this with Camunda was very easy because Java was already our strength, and Camunda was a really nice fit for our microservices ecosystem.” 

Q: How has your utilization of Camunda changed in that time? What processes do you currently automate/orchestrate, and which Camunda products do you utilize?

Alves: “We started with just one or two processes running in a Camunda standalone WildFly server with Camunda 7.7. Since then, we moved to have Camunda as an embedded library in our microservices running at Kubernetes, just like any other service we have. Today, we have 40 teams, and I can say that almost every one of them has at least one or two microservices running Camunda. We use Camunda Modeler, Camunda Cockpit, Tasklist, and REST APIs a lot.” 

Q: Did you receive support from the team at Camunda? If so, what role did that support play in the implementation process? 

Alves: “Yeah, we get a lot of support from Camunda. If you go to the Camunda Platform Forum and search for me, you will see that in the first years, I was always there asking questions. Geniuses like Niall and Thorben were always helping me. Today, I try to give back by helping other people the same way.” 

Q: Does Camunda have any impact on your life outside of work? In other words, have you built relationships due to the Camunda Community?  

Alves: “Of course! My life changed a lot in the last few years because of Camunda. There are many daily jokes around me being a Camunda Champion, like ‘Oh, look! Here comes the Champion.’”  

“I even love to talk about Camunda with other companies who have asked me on LinkedIn about how to start this journey. I really love being part of such a nice community built around Camunda. In my 10 years of experience, there is no other tool that I have become so involved with, nor have I been as embraced by their community as I am now with Camunda.” 

Q: What does being a Camunda Champion mean to you? 

Alves: “It’s an honor and keeps me remembering to help others just like how the community helped me when I started.”  

Q: Would you recommend Camunda to someone looking to solve similar challenges? Why? 

Alves: “Of course! I’m always selling Camunda to everyone who needs the same help we received to solve the same problems.” 

Q: You were a speaker at Camunda Community Summit this year! Can you tell us about that experience? 

Alves: “First, I have to say that Camunda Community Summit keeps getting better year after year, and this one was my favorite by far. Speaking at Camunda Community Summit was my first time giving a presentation in English, so it was even more special for me. I was really nervous, as you can probably see in the video, but the community embraced me so well. And after the presentation, I even made many friends on the Slack channel, ones who I’m still talking to now.”

Q: How do you hope your relationship with Camunda will grow over the years?

Alves: “I’m sure it will only continue to grow and improve. Now with the arrival of Camunda Platform 8, we have a lot of space to talk about the news and bring even more people to this lovely community.” 

Read about another inspiring Camunda Champion >>

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The Power of Partners: How Camunda’s Partners are Making an Impact https://camunda.com/blog/2022/05/the-power-of-partners-how-camundas-partners-are-making-an-impact/ Thu, 19 May 2022 20:00:00 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=54712 Have you heard of our Camunda Connect program? Learn how it's enabling our partners to make process automation more accessible to our clients.

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Since the launch of the Camunda partner program, Camunda Connect, hundreds of partner companies have developed solutions for Camunda’s process automation clients around the globe. These Camunda partners have built technology that has made process automation more accessible, impactful, and customizable for companies of various sizes across industries. The solutions developed by our partners have had a tangible impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of business processes for countless Camunda clients. 

To learn more about the impact of Camunda’s partners, we caught up with Christiana Christenson, global vice president at Camunda, who was recently named to the 2022 CRN Women of the Channel, in part due to her achievements in orchestrating the Camunda Connect program.

Q: Why are partners critical to the success of Camunda?

Christenson: There are several ways in which partners play a critical role for Camunda. First, Camunda made a strategic decision to focus on building and innovating our process orchestration platform. That means we are not focused on delivering professional services, business consulting, or other services that would dilute that focus. The reality is that we rely on our partners to develop, deploy, and implement Camunda for our clients, and our partners are best positioned to do that work.

Furthermore, with our product-led focus, we are not focusing on building applied functional or vertical solutions, we are instead looking to our partners to innovate and bring vertical expertise and solutions to market. For our partners, this is an outstanding opportunity to innovate, create value-add solutions around Camunda, and in the process, distinguish their leadership in delivering process automation solutions.

Q: You were recently recognized in CRN’s 2022 Women of the Channel, a who’s who of channel executives. What does that recognition mean to you?

Christenson: I’m humbled and grateful. There are so many fantastic channel pros on the list, and it’s an honor to be counted among them.

Q: Do you have any advice for other women who may seek to become executives in companies to help drive channel success?

Christenson: Just show up and give your best every day. Not every day will be a smashing “win,” but even in disappointments, embrace the opportunities to fail and treat them as learning experiences that can truly help you grow. Also, find a mentor who will ask you tons of questions, challenge you, push you, and help you to be honest with yourself.

Speak with openness and honesty and always do so as kindly as possible—which doesn’t mean it will always be well received, but at least heard and respected. 

Finally, remember that differences of opinions are healthy, and instead of looking at these situations as a threat, never make assumptions. 

Q. What has been the driving factor for the success of the Camunda Connect Global Partner Program since its launch in 2021? 

Christenson: The process automation market is experiencing explosive growth, driven by high demand from organizations that are looking to reinvent their processes for better digital experiences while reducing operational costs. Camunda finds itself in a great position to support these organizations with its scalable, flexible process orchestration platform that is easy to deploy and cost-effective to maintain and run. Partners see huge opportunities to bring Camunda’s new and innovative technology to their clients to solve their biggest process challenges, and as a result, we are seeing unprecedented demand to partner with Camunda in all of our markets and customer segments. It’s an exciting time to participate in the company’s success and help Camunda and partners alike to serve the customers in our market.

And Camunda has placed big bets on partners to drive our growth and adoption in the market and intends for at least half of our revenue to come through the channel. 

Q: What do you consider to be the cornerstone features of the Camunda Connect program? 

Christenson: We’ve built our program to support the way business works in the cloud, with flexibility for partners and the customers they work with. Partners can work with Camunda as one or more types of partners, depending on their modes of engagement and go-to-market models. With Camunda Connect, we have multiple types of partners: 

  • Services partners provide value-added services and implementation. 
  • Sales partners resell Camunda Platform.
  • Solution partners build platform solutions that they sell to end clients for specific use cases. 

We believe in flexibility for partners to engage in any or all of these modes, which drives consumption of our products and the related solutions and services customers need for their larger automation projects. We also based the program on the fundamental concept of building the capability of our partners, where knowledge drives better outcomes and for that reason, we’ve removed all “barriers to entry” for partners with free and unlimited sales and technical training.

Q: What kind of benefits do participating partners receive from the program? 

Christenson: Partners receive full and unlimited access to Camunda Partner Academy on-demand training, and skilled resources dedicated to working with partners to enable technical success.

In addition, we offer a partner portal to automate partner support with tools such as:

  • Self-service sales and marketing assets 
  • Access to funding and support for co-marketing initiatives 
  • New and streamlined deal registration with protections for partner investment

Q: What are you most proud of thus far in your career? 

Christenson: Enabling enduring success – for people I have worked with and counted among members of my teams, like my former bosses and so on. Seeing them succeed in bigger roles, etc., makes me happy. It’s also great to see companies where I’ve helped create partner businesses that are still successful today and know that I helped them to do that. I’m also grateful for the many amazing, kind, smart, interesting, and worldly people I’ve met along the way.

Q: Where can people find more information about the Camunda Connect Global Partner Program?

Christenson: Information about Camunda Connect and our partners can be found on our website. 

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Community Conversations: Uwe Koch, HDI Insurance https://camunda.com/blog/2022/04/community-conversations-uwe-koch-hdi-insurance/ Wed, 27 Apr 2022 13:00:00 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=51911 Check out the first installment of our Community Conversations blog series with Uwe Koch, a Camunda Champion and enterprise architect.

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For developers, enterprise architects, and other business professionals who utilize process automation technology, there is no limit on the potential use cases of automation. With organizations implementing process automation in so many unique ways, there is a wealth of knowledge to be found from experts around the world. The Camunda Community is comprised of a collaborative group of individuals who answer questions, speak at events, publish content, and participate in online communities. These Community members represent the heartbeat of Camunda, and they’re constantly finding ways to improve the strategy, implementation, and outcomes of process automation.

For the first installment of our Community Conversations blog series, we sat down with Uwe Koch, a Camunda Champion and enterprise architect at HDI Insurance. Uwe, who will be hosting a session during Camunda Community Summit on April 28, shared his journey from implementing his first process automation project more than 10 years ago to becoming one of Camunda’s most tenured Champions. 

Q: Could you please introduce yourself?

Uwe Koch: “My name is Uwe Koch. I’m a Camunda Champion and an enterprise architect at HDI Insurance, which is a subsidiary of Talanx – one of the top insurance groups in Europe. Since joining HDI Insurance almost 10 years ago, I’ve been mainly involved  in process automation projects.“

Q: When did you first discover Camunda?

Uwe: “When I first started at HDI, my job was to handle a very new process automation engine. That process engine, which was a box solution, was the result of the company’s first attempt to introduce automation. And while we were able to automate some processes with it, there were still disadvantages to that particular engine, because the best of suite/box approach brought in an own ecosystem for development, deployment and runtime. For example, we were housed with both Java developers and an infrastructure team that was writing code, so the lack of flexibility in that solution caused challenges; it became very hard to find the right combination of skill from both the development and infrastructure teams to handle this workflow engine.

“At that point, it became clear that automation works, but we knew we had to find a process automation solution that better fit our needs. Since we knew our demand for process automation was only going to increase, we set out to find a workflow engine that better fits our Java development life-cycle and our infrastructure team. We were seeking a process automation solution that feels like a standard Java application that’s deployed in production, where even cluster setup or database change would be a standard. That’s where Camunda comes in: Camunda was a natural extension of the Java world for processes. It was the perfect fit.”

Q: Were there specific processes you were trying to automate with Camunda?

Uwe: “The biggest focus for us as an insurance company was the handling of our policies. For example, if you want to modify a contract or make a new claim, there’s a lot of work to do. But most of this work follows a specific procedure. We knew we could save time and deliver an even better experience for our customers by introducing process automation throughout these processes.“

Q: How has your use of Camunda changed over time?

Uwe: “The first big project that showed us the power of Camunda was when we digitalized our car insurance processes. This project showed us the power of Camunda. We really liked the power of BPMN and the structure it introduces. We had always drawn out our businesses processes on a whiteboard to understand what we want to automate. Doing this in BPMN allows for a flawless transition from modeling to the coding stage. BPMN is not only documentation, but you can also bring it to life with automation. 

“Since then, we’ve introduced Camunda in sections across our business. For example, we have retail insurance and industry insurance business sections, which involve two very different processes, so we decided to utilize Camunda in each variation. In other words, we do not have just one central Camunda installation – we decide when and how to deploy Camunda based on the specific situation.”

Q: What does being a Camunda Champion mean to you?

Uwe: “I feel very honored to be selected as a Camunda Champion. It’s not easy to give a specific definition of what a Camunda Champion is, but for me, I’ve always been very involved in the community from the beginning. I talk often to other insurance companies and Camunda developers – I’ve also created meetups to help the Community share best practices with Camunda. Being part of the Community is not just a professional responsibility for me, it also gives me a chance to meet with interesting people, share ideas, and push the boundaries of what is possible with process automation.” 

Q: We’ve heard that your colleagues have given you a Camunda-themed nickname. Can you tell us about that? 

Uwe: “In Germany, the Hollywood movie called Coming to America, starring Eddie Murphy, is titled The Prince From Zamunda. I guess people made the connection of Zamunda-Camunda. Now, when colleagues and community members see me, they say, “Hey! It’s The Prince of Camunda!”

“I’m truly fascinated with process automation, specifically BPMN. People who are familiar with process automation and Camunda really seem to enjoy it and have fun with it, and I think this nickname is a great reflection of that.”

Register now for Camunda Community Summit to hear Uwe’s Presentation, “A Look Back at 10 Years of Process Automation at HDI insurance.”

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Swiss Re’s Journey Toward a Cloud-Native Orchestration Solution https://camunda.com/blog/2022/04/swiss-res-journey-toward-a-cloud-native-orchestration-solution/ Fri, 22 Apr 2022 18:00:00 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=51662 Ready for a digital transformation? Learn why Swiss Re selected Camunda Platform 8 as its cloud-native process orchestration solution.

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Swiss Re has recently undergone a transformative journey toward a modern and cloud-native process orchestration solution. The global reinsurance company decided to embrace a cloud strategy due to a desire to empty its data centers and achieve a long-term goal of integrating open, agile solutions for process automation. Simply stated, the company’s requirements for process automation had outgrown its monolithic BPM solution.


During CamundaCon, Swiss Re’s head of product integration, Benny Nedumkariyil, spoke about this epic transformation in a presentation inspired by Homer’s classic poem, The Odyssey. Nedumkariyil spoke about why his team selected Camunda Platform 8 as its cloud-native process orchestration solution and shared the long-term goals his organization is hoping to accomplish with this new BPMN workflow engine.  

Let’s take a closer look at Swiss Re’s odyssey toward a cloud-native process orchestration solution.

The Beginning of the Cloud Era 

The plan for Swiss Re, Nedumkariyil said, was to freeze the development of its legacy BPM platform and begin identifying the requirements for a new, more agile solution for process automation. The ultimate goals for this new platform were, “not only to empty our data centers and move toward open source solutions, but also to create a valuable service for our customer consumer clients at an affordable price,” Nedumkariyil said. 

These requirements made it clear that Swiss Re was in need of an adaptable, cloud-native process orchestration solution. In order to prepare his organization for the cloud, Nedumkariyil and his team began an extensive search for a replacement for their monolithic BPM solution and attempted to anticipate the potential challenges that could arise from the transition.

“We knew that this transition was also an investment in our people because they would have to learn this new technology. Fortunately, we have very good people…but we wanted to find a solution that was easy to understand and set up,”  Nedumkariyil said. 

Choosing Camunda Platform 8

The extensive research conducted by Nedumkariyil and his team led to several viable BPM solutions, all of which had the potential to act as the process engine of Swiss Re’s new automation platform. Ultimately, Camunda Platform 8, and its process automation engine, Zeebe, were chosen for Swiss Re’s new platform.

“The reason why we decided on Zeebe is because we believe it is future-proof…it has a cloud-native approach, and we can count on its scalability,” Nedumkariyil said.

With Camunda Platform 8, Nedumkariyil found not only the scalability and automation that he set out to discover in a BPM solution, but he also discovered the power of BPM notation (BPMN).

“Another benefit of Zeebe is the BPMN. It helps us understand our business and customers better, and it also allows our customers to understand us better. Camunda Platform 8 has become the bridge between us and our customers,” Nedumkariyil said.

3 Key Results

Process automation touches many aspects of operations at Swiss Re. The new process orchestration platform that the company built with Camunda Platform 8 has already made a big impact in a few key areas, Nedumkariyil said.

Government-related tasks

Swiss Re successfully moved through all quality gates of the digital governance framework, including licensing, security, and compliance, on time and with little issue.  

Production cluster

Swiss Re deployed a production cluster to the public cloud and also migrated most workflows to the new microservices orchestration platform. 

Upskilled team members 

All members of Nedumkariyil’s team learned, and continue to learn about microservices. The team also organized deep dives on these topics and shared insights with each other. Ultimately, workflow owners at Swiss Re learned to develop their own workflows, and Nedumkariyil is particularly proud of that achievement. 

Empowered to Excel

The story told by Nedumkariyil at CamundaCon is not only about digital transformation and cloud-native process orchestration, but also about empowering team members and workflow owners. While Camunda Platform 8 has already enabled improved scalability and process automation for Swiss Re, Nedumkariyil and his team think they’re only scratching the surface of what’s possible with process automation:

“It’s very important for a company to invest in its people and the future. We always need to be moving ahead and widening the horizons for the company. Process automation helps us do that.”

Want to hear the entire story? Watch the full video of Nedumkariyil’s presentation on Swiss Re’s epic transformation with Camunda Platform 8. 

Your organization can be next. Learn more about what Camunda Platform 8 offers and how we can support your digital transformation.

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Why Goldman Sachs Built a Brand New Platform on Camunda Platform 8 https://camunda.com/blog/2022/03/why-goldman-sachs-built-a-brand-new-platform/ Tue, 22 Mar 2022 13:30:00 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=46053 Get the details behind Goldman Sachs' new platform to provide microservice orchestration across all of its teams and meet client demands.

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*Camunda Platform 8, our cloud-native solution for process orchestration, launched in April 2022. Images and supporting documentation in this post may reflect an earlier version of our cloud and software solutions.


Since 2015, Goldman Sachs has used Camunda Platform 7 as the engine of its microservices orchestration platform intended to deliver financial automation at enterprise scale. With more than 60,000 unique users working with the platform each year, Goldman Sachs sees about six million tasks executed on its microservices automation platform each week.

In 2020, Goldman Sachs’ priorities for the microservices orchestration platform changed. As increasing demands on the service emphasized the need for throughput, scalability, and resilience, Goldman Sachs sought to build a new platform capable of adapting to these use cases. At the same time, the internal payments team at the company recognized a need for a platform that would provide additional security, the ability to recover from disruptive incidents in just minutes without data loss, and an overall smoother payment handling process.

Recognizing the need for a solution that could provide microservice orchestration across all of its teams and meet the changing demands of its clients, Goldman Sachs set out to build a new platform. Goldman Sachs’ Enterprise Process Automation Platform was born.

Why Build a New Platform on Camunda Platform 8?

The vision for the Enterprise Process Automation Platform was to build a platform that centralizes all required operations to provision, model, deploy, execute, and monitor any workflow-enabled application. Building this platform with Camunda Platform 8 as the horizontally scalable BPMN workflow engine would enable a higher level of automation, functionality, and adaptability for both Goldman Sachs and its clients. 

Some of the key features of this new platform include: 

  • Automated data retention, data purging, data backups, and lake integration to enable analytics.
  • Cluster provisioning integrated with data forms for better load balancing. 
  • Alert automation for self-protection and self-healing. 
  • Mirrored user experience for Camunda Platform 7 and Camunda Platform 8 users for consistency.
  • Integration with manual tasks and forms using current Goldman Sachs proprietary tooling to improve process automation. 

To ease the transition from Camunda Platform 7 to Camunda Platform 8, Goldman Sachs built a UI that implements a consistent software development life cycle (SDLC) across both platforms. Afterward, Goldman Sachs controls how clients are modeling, testing, and deploying models in order to provide a consistent SDLC to model, publish, and run models.

Finally, it was essential to Goldman Sachs that this new platform offers maximum visibility.

“When the platforms are running, we are provisioning a lot of information that is important to put together. We expose this information in the workflow control center and separate this information into separate categories for the platform provider and clients,” said Javier Sabino, global architecture lead, digitization and workflow engineering, Goldman Sachs.

Extending Camunda Platform 8 with Custom Extensions

Goldman Sachs also extended Camunda Platform 8 to incorporate non-functional requirements for five key categories. Sabino explains:

  1. Performance Testing: “Clients come to us with non-functional requirements before they even have their services ready. So we invested in a testing harness which allows us to configure clusters, execute services, and produce some reports which will show the best configurations for clusters to serve clients’ purposes.”
  2. Security: “We integrated Camunda Platform 8 with our single sign-on solution…we also added extensions to support data encryptions for clients.”
  3. Disaster Recovery: “We invested in a solution that helps Goldman Sachs recover from disasters, such as losing regions, in less than fifteen minutes.”
  4. Observability: “We have solutions that show you how your workflows are progressing. But we also invested a little bit further. We are extracting a lot of information from the platform to make sure the platform is healthy.”
  5. Deployment Automation: “We have many clients who have different ways of executing…we needed a way to automate the solution. The most important extension for this has been our custom containers.”

Each of these extensions has added additional layers to Goldman Sachs’ new Enterprise Process Automation Platform, benefitting both internal teams as well as clients; this level of customization is a key benefit of building a platform using Camunda Platform 8. 

Adapting with Camunda Platform 8 

Goldman Sachs was able to build a multi-purpose, scalable platform with Camunda Platform 8. The Enterprise Automation Platform developed by the company has proven to be resilient, adaptable, and a benefit to both internal and external users. 


Want to learn more? Our Camunda Community Summit 2022 expert-led sessions are now available to watch on-demand, including Javier Sabino’s talk on Enabling Technically Challenging Business Use Cases Using Camunda Platform 7 and Camunda Platform 8 at Scale.

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Reselling Made Easy: BuyBay Automates E-commerce Process with Camunda https://camunda.com/blog/2022/01/reselling-made-easy-buybay-automates-e-commerce-process-with-camunda/ Thu, 06 Jan 2022 14:30:00 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=40270 Learn how BuyBay worked with Camunda to enable more efficient operations of the reselling journey and automate key decision-making tasks. 

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E-commerce has fundamentally changed the buying habits of people around the world. Reduced shipping times and access to a larger variety of products are just a few benefits of the revolution in online commerce. But this incredible advancement in the relationship between buyers and sellers comes with its fair share of challenges.The additional waste caused by overstocked and returned products is one of the most significant of those newfound issues. 

Five billion pounds of waste each year are the result of products that are purchased then ultimately returned, a trend that has negative effects on both the planet and the bottom line of retailers. BuyBay, a company that resells product returns and overstock for retailers, brands, and manufacturers, aims to combat that challenge; reducing waste while benefiting both retailers and consumers is at the core of BuyBay’s business model. The reselling process, however, can be complex. 

Every product that arrives at BuyBay’s facilities needs to be assessed, graded, and routed through the correct stages of the reselling cycle before ultimately winding up in the hands of a new consumer. During CamundaCon, Rutger van Bergen, CTO at BuyBay, discussed how Camunda enables more efficient operations at each stage of the reselling journey by guiding manual processes while also enabling the automation of key decision-making tasks. 

BuyBay: A Breakdown of the Reselling Process 

BuyBay collaborates with retailers, e-tailers, and manufacturers that share an ambition to reduce waste caused by returned products. By guaranteeing that those products will be re-used while also generating the highest possible turnover for partners, BuyBay gives new life to products that would have previously ended up in landfills. 

In order to understand the effort necessary to salvage and resell returned products, a brief overview of the process is required. Once a returned product is received by BuyBay, the process of reselling can be broken down into two overarching categories, each of which has three stages: 

Processing Returns 

  • Sorting – the product is received, categorized, and prepared for grading. 
  • Grading – the product is tested, evaluated, and prepared for selling. 
  • Repairs (if needed) – if it’s determined during the grading stage that repairs are needed, the product receives repairs, and is then ready for resale. 

Selling Returns 

  • Pricing – an algorithm determines the best possible price and sales route for the product. 
  • Mass Listing – based on the algorithm’s determination, products are listed across e-commerce websites like Amazon, eBay, and others. All products are sold within 90 days. 
  • Shipment and Fulfillment – Shipping and customer success processes are managed by teams at BuyBay. 

The reselling process, from sorting to shipping, involves a number of moving parts and a blend of manual and automated processes to ensure each specific product receives the proper level of attention and preparation. Synchronizing those processes has been a main priority for BuyBay. 

A Ball of Process Complexity 

The moment an item is received by the BuyBay team, the process complexity begins. 

“At the beginning of the process, all we know is that we’ve received a box with something in it… we ultimately need to figure out what the correct final destination is for whatever is in the box,”  van Bergen said. 

But doing so requires the synchronization of both automated and manual business processes. As a result, a BPMN solution that can capture the process complexity integrated within each stage of the reselling process is a vital component of BuyBay’s BPM strategy. Since certain aspects of the process require a human touch — like taking photographs or repairing products — the ability to blend the automated and manual workflows within a BPMN is essential for building effective, repeatable processes for the company.

“To manage that massive ball of workflow complexity is why we originally decided to turn to Camunda,” van Bergen said. 

How BuyBay Uses Camunda 

BuyBay utilizes Camunda to manage the complexity in processes, particularly by selecting specific workflows for unique products at different stages of the reselling journey. To ensure products are progressing properly through each stage of the journey, and that human interaction is properly defined, BuyBay utilizes Camunda’s BPMN Workflow Engine


“Selecting the right flows for a particular product is caught in BPMN flows, and in those flows, we define where user input and user actions are required…this takes care of the complexity that needs to happen in the background,” van Bergen said. 

When it comes to the decision making complexity — as in determining what the next step is in any process — Camunda’s DMN Decision Engine is utilized.

“DMN uses a number of different inputs to come to a conclusion..regular product information, physical measurements, and answers provided by users in the workflow step. These things are combined in the DMN decision tables to direct the flow of a particular product.”

The end users in the BuyBay warehouse utilize a frontend solution developed in-house by BuyBay. This solution hides the complexity on the backend and only prompts users when manual inputs are required — a beautiful example of a marriage between automation and user input. 

What’s Next for BuyBay and Camunda 

Applying Camunda to better manage decision-making and process complexity has demonstrated just how effective BPMN and DMN can be in the reselling space. With that newfound knowledge, BuyBay has its sights on similarly lofty goals.

“We now have this wealth of knowledge and experience in BPMN flows and DMN tables, we now want to start using this to support products in our partners’ warehouses. We put together a modular with the right integration points so that it can be applied to warehouses’ existing management systems…this can create less bother on our decision engine.”

The impressive success BuyBay has had with Camunda up to this point, it turns out, is just the beginning. 
Ready for results? Get started with a Camunda free trial and experience some of the possibilities process automation can deliver to your organization.

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Behind the Scenes: BT Media and Broadcast Builds A Stronger Media Network with Camunda https://camunda.com/blog/2021/12/bt-media-and-broadcast-builds-a-stronger-media-network/ Mon, 13 Dec 2021 14:15:00 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=38461 Learn how the help of our process automation and support, made BT Media and Broadcast fully equipped to adapt for their clients' needs. 

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*Camunda Platform 8, our cloud-native solution for process orchestration, launched in April 2022. Images and supporting documentation in this post may reflect an earlier version of our cloud and software solutions.


BT Media and Broadcast is a leading global media services provider, distributing video and file-based content to companies like NBC, Universal, Fox, and others for more than 60 years. BT Media and Broadcast’s global media network plays a key role in the contribution of live television content, connecting cameras, program feeds, and satellites to create and distribute content to viewers of more than 500 media production companies. 

To ensure its global media network continues to deliver low-latency, high-quality video for its customers and their viewers, BT Media and Broadcast has prioritized the automation of physical media functions and services critical for next-generation media companies.

Ajit Dani, solutions architect at BT Media and Broadcast, spoke at CamundaCon about the impact of process automation, and highlighted how Camunda has helped the media service provider build a new, even more powerful global media network.

Ajit Dani, solutions architect at BT Media and Broadcast

The Vena Project: Building a New Network 

Eleven years after the initial BT Media and Broadcast content distribution network was built, the company set a goal of introducing an even stronger network to meet the demands of a larger, more distributed subscriber base while continuing to move content of the highest possible quality. This new network, the Vena network, was intended to improve concept-to-market times for customers and convert many of the manual processes required by the network into automated ones. As Dani said, “we set a goal of transforming and building a shiny new network to help us solve problems.” 

Previously, BT Media and Broadcast deployed off-the-shelf software to implement orchestrations and manage its content distribution network, with many processes still requiring manual intervention. But the company had a vision of an agile orchestration that could continue to be customized in a long-term effort to build more efficient and automated processes. It soon became apparent that building orchestrations and workflow processes in-house was the best way forward for BT Media and Broadcast on its mission to build a new network. 

“Because of the bespoke nature of our requirements, we found it was best to build these systems in-house as opposed to taking in vendor products,” Dani said.

The ultimate goal of the Vena Project was clear – to build an automated, programmable network that will deliver the highest possible quality to customers. To achieve this level of customization and configuration, BT Media and Broadcast needed a customizable solution.  

Automating and Optimizing: BT Media and Broadcast Leverages Camunda 

Having years of experience in attempting to implement off-the-shelf software solutions, Dani knew his company needed the ability to build customizable, automated workflows in order to achieve its goals for the new network. To effectively collaborate with designers and developers across the company and build automated processes that optimize performance and scalability, BT Media and Broadcast turned to Camunda. 

Camunda Platform 7 now provides BT Media and Broadcast with the design-time and runtime functions that enable collaboration between the enterprise, network designers, and developers. This improved connectivity between both teams and technology has allowed for a much faster development cycle, which means a quicker ability to apply configurations onto the new and improved network.

“A product manager or designer can effectively start testing different service variations. We no longer need to develop code to deliver different service variations. It can just be a rule in the DMN… This has really helped us speed up our development cycle.” 

The reusability of tasks built with Camunda Platform 7 allowed for rapid development of features across multiple microservices for BT Media and Broadcast, while the visualization of workflows enabled by Camunda also became an integral part of the success of The Vena Project. 

“Camunda gives you a design time and runtime function. Since the workflows are visual, you can get network designers and software designers together, and it becomes a good discussion point. You can literally draw out the processes,” Dani said. 

Looking to the Future with Camunda 

Successfully building an even stronger network, and automating countless manual processes, was a major accomplishment for Dani and BT Media and Broadcast. Building a low-latency content distribution network that’s reliable for some of the most popular TV channels in the world is an accomplishment that impacts the lives of millions, if not billions, of people. 

In order to continue to maintain its broadcast-quality network, scalability and network customization remain priorities for the company. With the help of process automation and support from Camunda, Dani feels his team is fully equipped to adapt. 

“With Camunda, we get support… We can have sessions with a team to help implement and optimize our workflows. This is key for the service-level agreement we offer to our customers.”

Ready for results? Get started with a Camunda free trial and experience some of the possibilities process automation can deliver to your organization.

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The Secret Behind the IT Transformation of Covéa Insurance https://camunda.com/blog/2021/12/the-secret-behind-the-it-transformation-of-covea-insurance/ Thu, 02 Dec 2021 14:00:00 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=37914 Get details on how solutions built with Camunda enabled Covea to organize data more effectively and create an even-stronger user experience.

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*Camunda Platform 8, our cloud-native solution for process orchestration, launched in April 2022. Images and supporting documentation in this post may reflect an earlier version of our cloud and software solutions.


For Covéa Insurance, a UK underwriting business of the French mutual insurance group Covéa, optimizing IT to improve user experience has always been a top priority. And as the needs of users evolved, so did Covéa’s thought process on how to most effectively utilize IT to solve challenges. 

The company’s IT network relies on various legacy systems that a team of IT experts diligently maintains. As Covéa attempted to strengthen its competitive advantages in areas such as user experience, it became clear that a digital transformation was required to usher those legacy systems into a new age of IT automation.


During CamundaCon 2021, Covéa’s chief architect, Simon Hickling, spoke about some of the challenges that these legacy systems created. He also explained how solutions built with Camunda as the process engine have helped the company develop automated processes that have enabled the company to organize data more effectively, improve customer satisfaction, and build an even-stronger user experience.

Constantly Improving Processes 

Historically, Covéa’s IT team led the decision making around technology and system investments. Leadership at Covéa soon realized that to build an even more effective user experience, IT and business operations should collaborate as much as possible. As the focus of the company’s IT efforts turned to automating processes, feedback from the operational team became invaluable. 

“We used to be in a position where we did IT to the business, and software decisions were made by the IT department…then the idea became to computerize the manual processes that were done,” – Hickling said. 

Today, IT and operations at Covéa work hand-in-hand to identify and implement software solutions that drive the company forward in computerizing and automating traditional processes. In order to most effectively create, implement, and customize those processes, Covéa relies on Camunda as its process engine.

Enabling Agile Development with Camunda 

With the rise of social media platforms, e-commerce websites, and other web-based services, users have begun to expect a nearly flawless online experience. Any process inefficiency, no matter how minor, would not be tolerated by Covéa’s customers.

“Users know exactly what they want and they have an idea of how they think things should work for them as a business,” Hickling said.

In addition to improving user experience, Covéa wanted to offer all its customers — as well as its employees, partners, and third-parties — more insight into outcomes and data that impact business processes. This required the ability to take into account unique business outcomes when building automated processes. The customization offered by Camunda made it possible  to improve user experience and build business processes for a variety of outcomes.

“What we found with Camunda is it allows processes to be revisited and brought into the world of Agile development,” Hickling said. “Our BPM systems now allow us to change the ‘how’ without adversely impacting business outcomes.” 

The agility enabled by Camunda has helped the IT experts of Covéa move past the stage of maintaining hardware and into a new era of designing custom, automated solutions.

“We can design something ourselves that works exactly how we want, or we can just make it rough and ready,” Hickling said. And when something works, “then we’ve found an efficiency that we can make the most of using Camunda.” 

Better Insights + Process Automation = Happy Users

By transforming its legacy system into end-to-end process automation, Covéa has gained better insights into data and saved time and money for the organization. Most importantly, the company has been able to build customizable user experiences that satisfy its customers.

“With Camunda, we can see what’s gone into the decision making process when building process automation. We can see what went into the decision and what was the outcome,” Hickling said. “But the most important thing it offers is giving us the ability to overwrite that and make individual process decisions for every customer.“


Ready for results? Get started with a Camunda free trial and experience some of the possibilities process automation can deliver to your organization.

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How Intuit Managed 19M Processes During Peak Tax, Accounting Seasons https://camunda.com/blog/2021/11/how-intuit-managed-19m-processes-during-peak-tax-accounting-seasons/ Tue, 16 Nov 2021 14:00:00 +0000 https://camunda.com/?p=36771 Dig into how Intuit used workflow automation to manage 396 transactions per second during its most demanding months.

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For a second straight year, experts from Intuit presented at CamundaCon and shared stories of challenges conquered through the power of automated workflows. The presentation offered a detailed look into how end-to-end process orchestration has helped the global technology company manage massive surges in traffic and requests during the always-busy tax and accounting seasons. 

With Camunda serving as its process engine, Intuit was ultimately able to manage 396 transactions per second during the company’s most demanding months, while also enabling 100% service level agreement availability.

This blog post will recap the insightful presentation and explore how Intuit has taken scalability to new heights with Camunda. 

Intuit Presenters: Nivedita Nayak, Principal Engineer, and Raghav Agarwal, Software Engineer 2

Tax and Accounting Seasons Drive More Traffic to Intuit 

Every year, Intuit experiences predictable surges in traffic and demand on its workflow automation platform. These peak periods occur twice annually: at the beginning of the new year when customers tend to open or close accounting books and then during tax filing season in the United States. 

“Our traffic was in the range of 50,000 visitors per day, but during peak demand, it surged to five times more at the new year and four times more during tax season.” 

– Nivedita Nayak, Intuit Principal Engineer

In addition to surging traffic during peak seasons, Intuit also sees a significant increase in its customers’ needs for transactions, review of transactions, and subscriptions. As a result of this across-the-board increase in activity, the need for a platform that provides customer and internal workflows as a service across the Intuit ecosystem became an absolute necessity. 

Handling Requests and Automating Workflows  

To build scalable workflows that can be customized to suit the needs of its customers, Intuit leverages end-to-end process orchestration from Camunda to build a product capable of managing such a massive increase in demand. 

“We use Camunda as our process engine,” Nayak said, “Camunda provides us with scheduling, state management, and acts as our rules engine.”

With Camunda serving as its process engine, Intuit’s workflow automation service acts as the stored house for templates and offers a designer interface – allowing customers to create their own workflows. Nayak said, “this service orchestrates both the definition of workflows and decreases program runtime,” while also, “providing abstraction, customization, and configuration for any workflows at scale.” 

Offering a custom workflow experience allows Intuit to tailor its offerings to customers based on use case, with the most common use cases involving approvals, reminders, bookkeeping, onboarding, and automation. But the workflow automation built on Camunda also has use cases within Intuit’s internal operations in areas such as loan processing and hiring.

“Two years ago when we started, we had one workflow and today we have over 22 diverse workflows that are being used,” said Nayak.

Intuit: Automating, Orchestrating, Scaling

During the most recent peaks for Intuit, the company supported up to 1 million workflow executions a day – an exponential increase from the 20,000 workflow executions per day the company was managing just weeks prior. During tax and accounting season, Intuit saw and managed more than 19 million total requests. In this critical time of the year for the company and its customers, scalability is critical to success. 

Not only was Intuit able to manage the surge in visitors and requests effectively, thanks to its workflow automation service, the company was also able to do so without any downtime, proven by their 100% availability during peaks. But, as it turns out, Intuit may just be at the start of its process automation journey with Camunda.

“We are evolving into an AI-driven expert platform,” Nayak said, “We want customers to focus on their business, which means we do all their accounting and tax filing. We want them to do less work and have more money.”

Ready for results? Try us out with a free trial and get a taste of the possibilities process automation can deliver to your organization.

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