Starting in 2019, First American, the 135-year-old real estate and financial services leader, embarked on a transformative journey to modernize its business processes. Faced with the need to evolve its legacy systems and streamline operations, First American turned to Camunda to deliver highly configurable solutions and enhance operational efficiency, organizational enablement, and statutory fulfillment.
The Challenge: Legacy Systems Stifled Innovation
As a longstanding company with deeply ingrained processes, First American encountered several challenges:
- Legacy systems: Legacy platforms were rigid, leading to process redundancy and inefficiency. The existing systems could not adapt to the business’s evolving needs.
- Lack of flexibility: The company needed a solution that allowed for rapid adaptation to changing industry requirements and customer expectations without extensive engineering involvement.
- Operational bottlenecks: Engineering was often seen as a bottleneck for process changes, delaying response times to customer needs.
- Data sensitivity: Managing vast amounts of sensitive data in compliance with regulatory standards requires robust monitoring and traceability.
The Solution: Process orchestration powered by Camunda
Camunda’s platform offered several vital benefits:
- Flexibility: Camunda supports an agile, microservices-based architecture, allowing First American to break down tasks and create custom processes. This eliminated process bloat and enabled the business to configure and manage workflows independently.
- Visibility: Comprehensive monitoring capabilities allowed First American to track every step of the process, ensuring compliance and providing valuable insights for continuous improvement. This was crucial for audit purposes and maintaining regulatory standards.
- Minimal impact: Camunda’s lightweight engine could be embedded within various microservices, reducing overhead and complexity. This facilitated seamless integration with existing systems and minimized disruption.
- Ease of design: The user-friendly interface empowered non-technical users to design and troubleshoot processes. This shift allowed product owners and business users to configure workflows directly, significantly reducing the dependency on engineering teams.
Implementation and impact
Initially, First American replicated existing processes in Camunda to fulfill orders, which led to redundancy and minimized the efficiency gains that an orchestration layer can bring to workflows. In 2022, they transitioned to a more modular approach, breaking down tasks into feature-rich workflows. This change was pivotal in reducing process redundancy and enhancing configurability.
By 2023, First American implemented the “Choose Your Own Adventure” pipeline, allowing different teams to build and manage their workflows. This approach improved operational efficiency and empowered the business to respond swiftly to customer needs without waiting for engineering interventions.
The results: A more flexible, efficient team delivers superior customer experiences
Operational efficiency: Using a subset of 1st quarter of 2024 as an example, First American processed 87,853 orders with 105,000 unique products, creating over 58 million flow node instances and making 155 million decisions automatically without end-user intervention, significantly reducing the time staff spends on tasks and allowing focus on strategic activities.
- Business empowerment: Non-technical teams can now design and manage workflows, freeing engineers to tackle more complex tasks, reducing backlog, and accelerating innovation.
- Regulatory compliance: Enhanced monitoring and traceability ensure all business processes adhere to regulatory standards, mitigating risks, ensuring data integrity, and maintaining comprehensive audit trails.
- Cost reduction: Automation has led to noticeable savings in operations and labor expenses by minimizing errors and reducing manual work. In addition, Camunda has played a key-role in accelerating the sunset of legacy platforms saving on infrastructure while minimizing complexity in our environment and for our teams to onboard and support long-term.
- Improved accuracy: Automated processes have increased data integrity and output quality, significantly reducing the opportunity for human error providing more reliable and accurate results.
- Scalability: Automation systems can scale to handle increased workloads without a proportional increase in resource costs, managing growing demands efficiently.
- Better customer experience: Faster response times and improved service quality have enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty by providing more efficient and reliable services.
- Resource optimization: Process orchestration has optimized resource use, allowing human talent to focus on high-value tasks and seamlessly integrating legacy applications to reduce the need for mass replacements.
- Data-Driven insights: Camunda has generated valuable data, providing insights that drive informed decision-making, strategic planning, and workflow refinement for improved overall efficiency.
- Agility and flexibility: Camunda enables First American to quickly adapt to changes in the business environment, maintaining competitiveness with agility and flexibility.
- Employee satisfaction: Automation and process orchestration have increased job satisfaction by allowing First American employees to focus on more fulfilling and creative work, reducing the burden of mundane tasks.
Conclusion
First American’s adoption of Camunda transformed their business processes, delivering significant flexibility, traceability, and operational efficiency improvements. By swiftly adapting to changes, ensuring compliance, and enabling non-technical users to manage workflows, First American has become more agile, with the benefits of increased operational effectiveness and overall business empowerment. As they continue to explore the capabilities of Camunda, First American is set to launch new products and further integrate the platform across different business lines, driving continuous innovation and growth.
