At Camunda, we frequently have conversations with a lot of organizations that are running their business processes on traditional IT solutions. Their business process logic and business rules driving pivotal points in the process flow are buried deep in .NET, Java, or Python programs, or in database elements like stored procedures. While this works, there’s typically a lot of friction when it comes to making processes visible and understandable across the business, as well as considerable time-consuming effort when changes need to be made.
Camunda is designed to make these and many other challenges far easier when it comes to business process orchestration and automation, not to mention adding numerous features you may never have thought of. Let’s explore how a Camunda-based solution adds value to an organization, accelerates solution development, increases agility, and helps in reducing the TCO (total cost of ownership) and shortening the TTM (time to market) for companies using it over a homegrown solution.
Improved business-IT collaboration
With Camunda, business teams get end-to-end visibility and control over the business process flow. What you see is what runs in the system!
Compare the BPMN flow below with the same logic living in a verbose document or a piece of code—the visual graphical model speaks for itself in terms of intuitiveness and clarity. With Camunda, the same BPMN model is used to design, implement, operate the solution and create business user reports. This gives all stakeholders visibility into what logic exactly runs inside the system.
The need to keep the documentation updated as the project evolves is obsolete. The BPMN is live documentation as well.
Reduced development effort
Why reinvent the wheel? Camunda helps you reduce development effort and focus only on implementing your use case specific business logic.
BPMN provides out-of-the-box support for complex logic, like asynchronous waits on an incoming message, timer-based action triggers, clearly defined compensation activities to implement rollbacks in a distributed transaction, automated error handling with an option for human intervention, and open standards based business rules with DMN;. all of this with the powerful scalability that Camunda provides.
Programming all of these on your own is redundant when Camunda does this out of the box. Leverage Camunda accelerators like connectors and reusable assets like blueprints.
Calling a REST API, SOAP service, Lambda function, RPA system, SAP, CRM, Database, or any of the other cloud services? We have you covered! Use the out-of-the-box connectors and accelerate your efforts! Here’s a sample of how easy it is to make a REST call:
Leverage the greatness of AI without additional integration effort—use the AI connectors to bring in intelligent process flow execution with Camunda. AI becomes just another endpoint to be orchestrated rather than investing development effort to establish this integration.
Leverage our AI-based BPMN Copilot to convert your verbose use case documentation or existing programs with business logic to create BPMN. Save time and accelerate your implementation!
Create UI forms in a low-code fashion—make use of Camunda forms to quickly create UI forms using the drag-drop Camunda forms editor. Nontechnical business users can quickly create UI forms themselves, and for the cherry on top? You can create forms in Camunda and display them in your custom front end applications!
Gain end-to-end visibility across the process model
Camunda enables true end-to-end visibility across your whole process model. For example:
- Diagnostics and troubleshooting get easier since you can exactly pinpoint the status of the workflow or the point of failure without having to devour log files from multiple systems, especially in case of distributed systems or microservice architectures.
- This enhances the efficiency of the operations and support teams, which need fewer FTE, freeing up IT teams to focus on innovation.
Check out the screenshot below of a sample Operate dashboard demonstrating the data variables and point of failure.
Business reports and insights out of the box
With Optimize, Camunda helps you generate detailed reports automatically. We provide the ability for business users to create self-service reports that are near real time using a wizard-based approach without any query languages.
Use Optimize’s wizard-based approach to:
- Define your business KPIs and business audit reports
- Identify opportunities to improve the business process flow
- Create datasets that are ML-ready for further analysis
- Set up alerts in case of KPI accomplishments/SLA breaches and so on
Take a look at the sample Optimize dashboard below:
Increased operational agility
Changes to your business flows become much clearer and faster when you use Camunda. For example:
- Moving the business logic into BPMN and DMN cuts down on a lot of complexity, and maintenance over the longer term becomes easier.
- With traditional systems, you could need a daunting amount of time to analyze the impact of the change in the code base and implement the code changes while keeping the code base maintainable.
- With the business process depicted in the graphical BPMN notation, the impact analysis is short. Implementing the change could range from simply reorganizing the tasks in the BPMN to adding or removing tasks from the BPMN to modifying your service-task or custom connector implementations to changing the rules in DMN tables. All much easier and more straightforward.
Agile and IT teams can quickly respond to change requirements to meet business needs, ensuring that your solution can remain compliant to ever-changing regulatory compliance requirements. This of course also enables your business to remain competitive in the market.
Disaster Recovery
Zeebe has built-in active-active replication, which means you have Disaster Recovery (DR) out of the box. This lays the foundation for a resilient and highly available stage engine. Additionally we also support multi-region setups, enabling active-active or active-passive modes of Disaster Recovery across different geographical regions to ensure resilience for mission critical applications.
Innovate at any scale
Since there is no database backing its state, Camunda can scale almost linearly to meet your growing throughput requirements as your business grows! Need more throughput? It could be as simple as adding more nodes and scaling the Zeebe Cluster.
Our benchmarks have demonstrated that we can handle hundreds of process instances and thousands of task instances per second. Camunda can also handle both high throughput and low-latency use cases. Take a look at the following Grafana snapshot from a Camunda benchmark run using a BPMN process with 11 service tasks.
An open, composable, and flexible architecture
We use open standards for building the process models and implementing business rules. Camunda strives to provide low-code features to accelerate solutioning while also being developer-friendly to implement customised solutions.
By now, we all know that customisations to out-of-the-box features are often necessary. Camunda is flexible and composable, allowing you to replace out-of-the-box components with custom coding where needed. Design standardized solutions without vendor lock-in!
We’ll take care of process orchestration so you can focus on your business problems
Rather than building all these capabilities from scratch again, leverage our orchestration platform’s capabilities to help your IT teams focus on just solving your business problems. We’ll take care of orchestrating your business process flows end-to-end at scale!
The rest of the iceberg
What’s next? Camunda’s flexible, scalable, and intelligent orchestration and automation platform empowers you to create a composable and best-of-breed architecture. Operationalize AI to meet your current business requirements while staying comfortably poised to leverage other new technological disruptors as they become available in the future.
The platform provides a number of out-of-the-box components like RPA to integrate with legacy systems, Tasklist to enable human interaction, a DMN-based business rules engine, and Intelligent Document Processing.
Camunda is also flexible enough to be used in a plug-and-play fashion. Swap a certain OTB component with your specific solution. For instance, you could swap Camunda’s RPA with your existing RPA solution, or swap the Tasklist with your custom UI.
Similar to a building made of LEGO blocks, Camunda provides the flexibility to swap out the components that you want with other implementations to suit your needs. This lets you eliminate vendor lock-in and discover more value for your business!
Moving from a legacy solution to Camunda
Hopefully the value Camunda provides is easy to see, but of course it’s still a change if you’re already using something else. If you’re evaluating the effort to migrate from your programming-based solution to Camunda, be sure to:
- Check out Camunda’s BPMN Copilot to convert the business process logic in your programming code like Python, Java, C# etc into BPMN quickly. This saves a huge chunk of time while migrating your business process flow to Camunda.
- Consider that you can refactor business-specific logic into service tasks or project/enterprise-specific connectors, promoting standardisation and reuse.
- Talk to us! We’re happy to explore the possibilities and benefits for your specific use case!
Start the discussion at forum.camunda.io