ibm bpm case study

No account yet?

Barclays enhances customer experience with ibm bpm solution.

• Analytics & Modeling - Process Analytics
• Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
• Finance & Insurance
• Fraud Detection
• Process Control & Optimization
• The adoption of the IBM BPM solution has significantly improved Barclays' operational efficiency and customer service. The solution has enabled the bank to assess and build an automated process for reporting lost or stolen debit cards and deploy the same process across different lines of business globally. The bank can now make many iterations and roll out new customer processes much faster, truly offering customer-centric experiences. The solution has also allowed Barclays to analyze 2.2 billion transactions annually for fraud, enabling them to identify the need to cancel payments on the first fraud hit and use SMS to contact the customer in real time. This has put customers in control, allowing them to respond in real time.
• Barclays can now roll out new customer processes 88 percent faster, reducing the time from two years to 13 weeks.
• Customers can now report lost or stolen debit cards using their preferred channels and receive replacement cards 67 percent faster than before, reducing the wait time from six to two working days.
• Barclays increased its customer satisfaction around automated, multichannel services from a negative Net Promoter Score (NPS) to an NPS of 70.

Case Study missing?

Start adding your own!

Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.

Related Case Studies.

• Case Studies
• IIoT Top 100

Thank you for your message! We will contact you soon.

• Automating Your Business
• Blueworks Live
• BPM, Workflow, and Case
• Business Automation Insights (BAI)
• Cloud Pak for Business Automation
• Content Management and Capture
• Decision Management (ODM, ADS)
• Expertise Connect(EC) Group
• Global Business Automation
• IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT)
• Open Editions
• Process Mining
• Robotic Process Automation
• watsonx Orchestrate
• ANZ User Group
• Business Automation Nederland User Group
• Business Automation User Group DACH
• Capture User Group
• CM8 User Group
• Content Manager OnDemand
• IBM Enterprise Records User Group
• India Automation User Group
• Japan Business Automation User Group
• Midwest User Group
• New England ECM Users Group
• NYC ECM Metropolitan User Group (EMUG)
• Public Sector User Group
• UKI Automation User Group
• User groups
• IBM TechXchange Conference
• Upcoming Business Automation Events
• IBM TechXchange Webinars
• All IBM TechXchange Community Events
• Gamification Program
• Getting Started
• Community Manager's Welcome
• Post to Forum
• Share a Resource
• Share Your Expertise
• Post a Blog
• Blogging on the Community
• Connect with Automation Users
• All IBM TechXchange Community Users
• IBM TechXchange Group
• IBM Champions
• IBM Cloud Support
• IBM Documentation
• IBM Support
• IBM Technology Zone
• IBM Training
• Learn More About Our Products
• IBM TechXchange Conference 2024
• Marketplace

IBM Business Automation Community Come for answers. Stay for best practices. All we’re missing is you. Join / Log in Ask a question

• Participate
• Blog Viewer
• Discussion 3.2K
• Library 159
• Members 2.7K

Moving from IBM Case Manager to IBM Business Automation Workflow - Development and End-User View

By olaf hahnl posted mon may 25, 2020 04:11 pm.

• Unified Workflow Center to manage Process Apps and Case solutions
• New Workflow project type combining Case and BPM artifacts
• BPMN Processes implementing a Case activity are created as part of the Workflow project
• Case objects allow to easily and dynamically read/write Case and Case activity properties from within BPMN processes
• For each Case role a BPM team is created with changes to the members of the Case role being synchronized to the team
• User tasks in BPMN processes that use a team backing a Case role are displayed in the respective role-specific in-baskets
• Ability to customize custom Process Activity Details Pages providing the ability to combine Case widgets and BPMN user tasks on one page

• Discussions
• IBM TechXchange Conference 2023
• IBM Community Webinars
• All IBM Community Events
• Become a Blogger
• All IBM Community Users
• Community Front Porch

• Why Choose Us
• Cloud Services
• E-Commerce Services
• Host Access Transformation Services (HATS)
• Our Services – Business Process Management
• MQ (Messaging Queue)
• Integration Bus (IIB)
• Mobile Solution
• Portal Services
• Robotic Process Automation
• Security Services
• Database Managed Services
• WebSphere Application Server
• Artificial Intelligence Services
• Monitor Probe
• Get In Touch

IBM BPM UseCase

Recent blogs, ibm message queue use case, iib converts into app connect enterprise, cloud data management services: a foundational understanding, unlocking efficiency with infrastructure as a service iaas.

One of our Client who is vendor of bookshelf for decades. They recently entered into online retailing with an impressive mobile app. It was a delight to use the iPad app and the whole process of ordering was pleasant. It was customer experience at its best. 

The delivery of the bookshelf for their customers was delayed after it was re-scheduled three times. Even after two months, the bookshelf was not delivered. There was no pro-active communication from the company. Frustrated, customers cancelled their orders. Then started the painful refund process. After three months, customer neither have the bookshelf in the office nor the refund in the bank.

What started as a superior customer experience with a modern and beautiful app, ended with a frustrating experience.

The Analysis

We often relate customer experience with usability of the customer touch points. Whether an app, online portal, or a website, a modern, intuitive, mobile enabled interface provides a rich experience to customers. In this case, it did this pretty well. It booked customer’s order without any hassles. However, a great app is just one aspect of customer experience. Good usability is necessary, but not sufficient.

The retailer failed with its broken order fulfillment business process. This is what hubcom think is broken:

• The new app created on a mobile platform is not thoroughly integrated with back-end systems and the app does not know if the warehouse has enough stock to fulfill all orders in pipeline.
• The order fulfillment process is executed piecemeal across silo’ed enterprise systems with manual work being done for some activities
• This results in a lack of process visibility and missing alerts when things are delayed. There wasn’t proactive communication to me when the order was delayed.
• The system running the customer support process is not integrated real-time with order fulfillment. The customer support agent does not have visibility into the exact order status.
• The manual and inefficient nature of the business process execution results in longer cycle times.

A great app won them a customer. A failed business process lost the customer.

The Solution

The solution to this problem lies in having a more holistic view of customer experience, looking beyond just the usability of customer facing apps. The business process that runs the show backstage also needs to be first-rate. In the case of the retailer, the following is required:

• End-to-end automation of order fulfillment business process enabling seamless execution of the process across the multiple systems and people involved
• Strong process monitoring with ability to track Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) of product delivery at every stage with pro-active escalations when deliveries are predicted to be delayed – not reactively after they are delayed
• Proactive communication to customer via variety of channels (emails, text messages, etc.)
• Deep visibility into the process execution with ability to know the latest status and related updates about a delivery to everybody who needs to know – e.g. Customer Service, Warehousing, Dispatching, etc.
• Analytics to identify process improvement areas

Modern BPM – The Necessary and Sufficient Condition for Superior Customer Experience

The above analysis reveals a two-prong strategy for addressing the situation at hand:

• Rich and modern user experience
• Robust business processes

Business Process Management (BPM) platforms were born to build process excellence. BPM has traditionally empowered organizations to build robust business processes that add great business value. The modern BPM platforms have taken this further with new capabilities that equip them to address even wider pain areas.

• Dynamic Case Management

Ability to execute ad-hoc workflows to resolve a customer situation quickly – like order delays, in our client case.

• Low Code Application Development

The ability to build modern apps thoroughly integrated with underlying systems without writing much code.

• Mobile Enabled Interactions

Modern BPM’s have a robust mobile strategy. Developers can build their process solutions once and deploy on multiple mobile platform without re-writing the code, avoiding the need of a stand-along mobile development platform that needs to be separately integrated into the IT infrastructure.

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Modern BPM’s offer integrated RPA capabilities to enable automation of routine, manual tasks such as reading from document, updating an excel sheet, uploading files to SharePoint, copy-pasting data into legacy applications, etc. These highly fatigue prone tasks can now be automated leading to improved efficiency.

• Empowered by AI

Artificial intelligence built natively in modern BPM platforms offers sophisticated capabilities to organizations to learn about their customers, e.g. in our client case, an AI driven BPM would have identified a pattern of negative sentiments in their customer emails and flagged customer service to take action proactively.

The above five capabilities extend the horizons of modern BPM platforms into areas that were assumed to be outside the scope of classical BPM. The modern BPM platforms can not only build robust business processes, they make them even more flexible, agile, intelligent, and powered by rich user experience. The precise solution for our client desperately needed to fix their customer experience.

Some other features are defining below in picture

What has been your experience dealing with your service providers? Do you think they need a modern BPM? Let us know.

• © 2018

Business Process Management Cases

Digital Innovation and Business Transformation in Practice

• Jan vom Brocke 0 ,
• Jan Mendling 1

Institute for Information Systems, University of Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics & Business, Vienna, Austria

• The first book to present an extensive collection of real-world cases on Business Process Management
• Includes cases from world's leading organizations in various sectors
• Presents cases from a wide range of regions around the world

Part of the book series: Management for Professionals (MANAGPROF)

5.28m Accesses

134 Citations

53 Altmetric

• Table of contents

About this book

Editors and affiliations, about the editors, bibliographic information.

• Publish with us

Buying options

• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check for access.

Table of contents (32 chapters)

Front matter, frameworks for business process management: a taxonomy for business process management cases.

• Jan vom Brocke, Jan Mendling

Strategy and Governance

How to move from paper to impact in business process management: the journey of sap.

• Corinne Reisert, Sarah Zelt, Joerg Wacker

Developing and Implementing a Process-Performance Management System: Experiences from S-Y Systems Technologies Europe GmbH—A Global Automotive Supplier

• Josef Blasini, Susanne Leist, Werner Merkl

Establishment of a Central Process Governance Organization Combined with Operational Process Improvements

• Christian Czarnecki

BPM Adoption and Business Transformation at Snaga, a Public Company: Critical Success Factors for Five Stages of BPM

• Andrej Kovačič, Gregor Hauc, Brina Buh, Mojca Indihar Štemberger

Enabling Flexibility of Business Processes Using Compliance Rules: The Case of Mobiliar

• Thanh Tran Thi Kim, Erhard Weiss, Christoph Ruhsam, Christoph Czepa, Huy Tran, Uwe Zdun

Comprehensive Business Process Management at Siemens: Implementing Business Process Excellence

• Bartosz Woliński, Saimir Bala

People-Centric, ICT-Enabled Process Innovations via Community, Public and Private Sector Partnership, and e-Leadership: The Case of the Dompe eHospital in Sri Lanka

• Wasana Bandara, Rehan Syed, Bandula Ranathunga, K. B. Sampath Kulathilaka

Fast Fish Eat Slow Fish: Business Transformation at Autogrill

• Stijn Viaene, Joachim Van den Bergh

The NESTT: Rapid Process Redesign at Queensland University of Technology

• Michael Rosemann

Kiss the Documents! How the City of Ghent Digitizes Its Service Processes

• Amy Van Looy, Sabine Rotthier

Application of the Design Thinking Approach to Process Redesign at an Insurance Company in Brazil

• José Ricardo Cereja, Flavia Maria Santoro, Elena Gorbacheva, Martin Matzner

Collaborative BPM for Business Transformations in Telecommunications: The Case of “3”

• Thomas Karle, Kurt Teichenthaler

Process Management in Construction: Expansion of the Bolzano Hospital

• Elisa Marengo, Patrick Dallasega, Marco Montali, Werner Nutt, Michael Reifer

Exposing Impediments to Insurance Claims Processing

• Robert Andrews, Moe Wynn, Arthur H. M ter Hofstede, Jingxin Xu, Kylie Horton, Paul Taylor et al.

Mining the Usability of Process-Oriented Business Software: The Case of the ARIS Designer of Software AG

• Tom Thaler, Sabine Norek, Vittorio De Angelis, Dirk Maurer, Peter Fettke, Peter Loos

Improving Patient Flows at St. Andrew’s War Memorial Hospital’s Emergency Department Through Process Mining

• Robert Andrews, Suriadi Suriadi, Moe Wynn, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Sean Rothwell
• Case Studies
• Business Process Management
• Teaching Cases
• Professional Cases
• Real-World BPM Cases

“The book is a useful and comprehensive summary of several real-life case studies for organizations and researchers. It is a valuable resource in the form of empirical evidence.” (Bálint Molnár, Computing Reviews, July, 2018)

Jan vom Brocke

Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics & Business, Vienna, Austria

Jan Mendling

Book Title : Business Process Management Cases

Book Subtitle : Digital Innovation and Business Transformation in Practice

Editors : Jan vom Brocke, Jan Mendling

Series Title : Management for Professionals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58307-5

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Business and Management , Business and Management (R0)

Copyright Information : Springer International Publishing AG 2018

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-319-58306-8 Published: 29 August 2017

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-319-86372-6 Published: 14 August 2018

eBook ISBN : 978-3-319-58307-5 Published: 10 August 2017

Series ISSN : 2192-8096

Series E-ISSN : 2192-810X

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XVI, 610

Number of Illustrations : 290 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour

Topics : Business Process Management , Information Systems Applications (incl. Internet) , Business Information Systems , Organization , Organizational Studies, Economic Sociology

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Growing client revenue through high-quality, targeted media campaigns

The Ultimate Guide to Migrating from a Legacy Business Process Management Suite (BPMS)

19 min read

Learn the benefits, key considerations, and technical steps to transition from a BPMS successfully.

Guide to achieving a legacy bpms to camunda migration.

When organizations first set out to automate business processes, many may have purchased a traditional business process management suite (BPMS). In time, teams find that these products are not suited to the modern world of process automation, which requires agility, scalability, and openness. With the rise of cloud infrastructure, containers and microservices-based application development, the inflexibility of legacy BPMS becomes a blocker to development teams’ progress and innovation. When left unchecked, this technology can also translate into ineffective or delayed customer experiences. 

Why? Legacy BPMS, which are also known as iBPMS, rely on closed architectures and a proprietary approach to development, which limits business agility and makes it difficult and expensive to make changes. These systems can’t scale dynamically in response to business demand, which means they often cause performance issues that negatively affect customers. And they don’t provide the tools teams need to continuously improve processes.

A modern approach to process automation gives development teams the open, API-first architecture to use the tools they want, on their terms. Rather than locking in to proprietary development methodologies, this approach makes it easier and faster to design processes, using a widely known process modeling standard called BPMN . Once the processes are modeled, a universal orchestration layer “drives” even the most complex processes in production – across people, systems and devices. Process orchestration is built to support both short- and long-term business processes that run for hours, days, weeks, or even months.

So, if your organization is using a legacy BPMS, what are the most important considerations to make before migration? How do you get started with migrating to a modern process orchestration solution like Camunda? This guide will walk through the steps to achieving a successful migration, including both the cultural and technical aspects of this facet of digital transformation. Let’s dive in.

Key considerations for BPMS replacement

For many organizations, overcoming inertia can be the biggest issue in replacing a legacy BPMS . The time and effort required to migrate might seem too much to take on. And, it may seem difficult to interrupt complex, long-running processes to move them to a different platform. But the temporary process of modernization almost always outweighs the risks of doing nothing. 

Download Whitepaper: Replacing Legacy BPM: Solution Selection Factors

Throughout this guide, we’ll look at practical examples of companies that have successfully completed their migrations. You’ll find that many of these organizations were running their processes on decades-old, monolithic systems that slowed down the development lifecycle. One company, Deutsche Telekom , was facing 12+ month timelines to develop new features into production for customers, and found themselves limited by their legacy vendor’s inflexibility. Across the board, the forcing function for migration was to not just keep up with development timelines, but meet and exceed sky-high customer expectations.

With that said, it’s important to evaluate the features and benefits of a new process automation and orchestration solution. Here are some of the most critical considerations for these technology providers. 

Source: PeerSpot, Replacing Legacy BPM, Solution Selection Factors, 2021.

Speed for designing and deploying processes

Rather than having to wait months or years to design and deploy a new process, a new solution should empower development teams to move quickly, and enable industry best practices around continuous delivery. In fact, when evaluating a process automation and orchestration solution, you should be able to quickly set up a proof of concept (PoC) to evaluate its efficacy – even within a few days to a week, depending on the process’ complexity. We’ll cover more about the PoC process later. From there, it should be easier to understand how to migrate your existing processes (if possible), or remodel them to work effectively in a new environment. 

Simplicity with BPMN and DMN

Look for a solution that supports open standards such as BPMN and Decision Model and Notation ( DMN ). These standards add simplicity to defining processes, rules and workflows – making these concepts easier to understand across both IT and line-of-business stakeholders. A platform should also allow for continuous process improvement, making it easy to identify bottlenecks in your processes and quickly resolve them. 

This simplicity helps with getting started, change management, and maintenance. Ideally, a new system should empower existing teams, and should not require proprietary expertise to run. In fact, the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the new solution should be much lower than legacy BPMS, thanks to its ease of use.

Flexibility and collaboration

With a rise in remote work and distributed teams, flexibility and collaboration capabilities become especially important. Using the BPMN and DMN standards, teams should be able to collaborate, share logic about process rules, and more regardless of their location or level of expertise. From there, process orchestration tools should work seamlessly within developers’ existing toolchains, including a preferred IDE or version control system like Git. Ideally, these solutions should fit neatly within a modern, agile software development lifecycle (SDLC). 

Open, API-first architecture

When selecting a new solution, developer friendliness is key. Beyond the open modeling standards mentioned above, a platform should support software communication protocols and standards such as JSON and open APIs. APIs represent a fast and easy-to-change approach to headless process automation. In addition, they make a platform extensible with the tools developers prefer to use. Look for a modular design that can run on public, private, or hybrid cloud, and that works with modern technologies such as Kubernetes and Kafka.

Prepping your organization for a BPMS migration

Once you’ve decided to undertake a BPMS migration, it’s important to prepare for both the cultural and technical changes that are about to take place. Typically, there are many different stakeholders involved in process automation, including developers, enterprise architects, IT decision-makers, and line of business leaders. As a result, this type of project requires IT and business stakeholder alignment. 

For Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance , stakeholder buy-in was a critical first step to kicking off their migration. The development team had worked extensively with the previous BPMS, and originally had a, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” mentality. To change the developer mindset, it was important to clearly communicate the big picture business benefits to this team. For example, experienced senior developers wanted to know their work would be valuable, and that they’d be delivering something beneficial for the business end user. 

Next, with the help of a consultant, the team dove into their first process design PoC. A PoC should help your team: 

• Verify that a specific approach or tool works within your scenario
• Showcase an example that gets internal stakeholders to buy into a larger automation effort
• Work through granular questions before kicking off a larger effort.

Read more: Doing a Proper PoC

Jarvis Ka, enterprise architect at Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance, stressed the importance of setting expectations with the development team on the time required to get an end-to-end process automation system into production. This involves adjusting expectations at both the scrummaster and project manager levels. Many of these manager-level stakeholders may be resistant to change, so it’s important to explain how existing processes will transition to the new system. For example, a line of business manager might be concerned about how the user experience (UX) might change for the end-user when filing a new mobile insurance claim. 

To cut down on resistance and demonstrate these changes, Ka and his team highlighted BPMN diagrams created during the PoC phase, and annotated them with more information describing each task in the process. From there, they created PDFs and sent them to each business stakeholder. This cut down on the number of meetings required by giving them a visual representation of process workflows in the new process automation and orchestration system. 

Often, process automation migrations are a part of a larger IT modernization effort. Depending on the size of the company, the migration process may either be handled by a larger Center of Excellence (CoE) or just a few IT stakeholders, such as an enterprise architect and a small team of developers. Either way, it’s critical for a focused team to drive the migration process, ideally by starting small with a PoC. From there, this team’s role is to:

• Equip the larger development team to use the system
• Help line-of-business leaders understand that processes might look different (including UIs and process flow)
• Enable relevant teams to use the automated processes and request changes if needed.

Technical steps to completing a BPMS migration

The guide below is intended for organizations migrating from a legacy BPMS system to Camunda, which uses the BPMN 2.0 standard for process definition and deployment. If you’re migrating from a BPMN-based system to Camunda, your journey will be much easier than if you’re using proprietary BPMS process definitions. Even so, this general framework should serve as a good foundation for the migration process. 

Step 1: Migrate process definitions

Typically, it’s better to remodel existing processes, rather than completing an automated conversion. Often, the number of process definitions is limited. That means it often takes less time to remodel processes than to create and test an automated conversion. Typically, modeling one process at a time (e.g. completing the process for a PoC) can give you a better feeling of how much effort it takes to migrate process definitions in your environment, with the talent you have.

By remodeling processes, you can also leverage the full power of BPMN 2.0, and improve upon existing processes that may not have been revised in years. 

In some cases, it may make sense to use the tools Camunda’s consulting team has created to migrate process flows from IBM BPM, IBM Blueworks Live, Oracle, Pega, and TIBCO. These migration shortcuts can be found here on GitHub . To be clear, none of these tools are intended to be a “silver bullet” that will transform applications from one vendor to another at the click of a button. 

Typically, these tools will generate a BPMN file that attempts to retain the fidelity of the original process diagram. The Camunda migration tools make extensive use of the Camunda Model APIs to create the BPMN file. Having the source code available will enable you to extend the tools, as needed.

Depending on the vendor you’re migrating from, you’ll still need to add the components (code, scripts, etc.) to make the process executable. 

Read more: Migrating processes from Pega to Camunda  

Migrating process BPMN from IBM BPM to Camunda

Step 2: Migrate process instances

Migrating process instances (or the data contained within them) is unavoidable if you have long-running processes – as some of these processes continue to run at any given time. Getting the data out of the existing BPMN platform is the hard part. There are two basic approaches to migrating process instances:

PRO : Because you do not need to migrate running process instances, you’ll save effort on this step. Also, going live with Camunda is typically less risky, as the old system is still in place and operating.

CON : Operating two systems in parallel for a longer time requires additional effort. The switching logic normally is not easy to implement and test for all corner cases. Also, the team’s motivation could be at risk, as people may be eager to discard the old system and move on.

PRO : After the migration, you only have one system to operate, and you can test the migration beforehand to avoid any surprises.

CON : Implementing and testing the migration script requires additional effort. Also, usually the run time of the migration scripts and possible additional health checks afterwards enforce some downtime.

In order to create process instances in the correct state, you do not want to trigger any service tasks or wait for human interaction on the way. Also, the desired state might even be somewhere down a hierarchy of sub-processes. This can make the task a bit more complex and require you to add elements to your process model solely for migration. With that said, if your use case is simpler, the Camunda API should be sufficient enough to migrate process instances in the correct state without the need for any extra elements.

Based on your exact situation, you’ll have to decide which approach is best for your organization. Concurrent operation is very specific to your architecture and technology. In contrast, the Big Bang migration always involves a “migration script,” which requires some knowledge of Camunda to implement. 

For more information on migrating your process instances to a new version, check out this Camunda best practices guide. 

Case Study: Migrating from Oracle to Camunda

In 2007, Deutsche Telekom built a monolithic system based on the Oracle BPEL engine to run BPM workflows and process automation. As time went on, this monolith created a number of issues that affected both the business and user experience, including:

• A lengthy time-to-market lasting more than 12 months
• Vendor lock-in limited the implementation of new features – it took five days to set up or make changes to environments
• Releases took an average of 1000 people-days, or roughly three months to realize
• Regression testing took around two days to process all test cases.

“We need to be on time. We can’t wait seven days to process an order or respond to something; we need to be always ahead and responsible,”  said Willm Tueting, managing director, conology GmbH,  who has worked with Deutsche Telekom IT for more than 10 years.

Laying the groundwork for change through process orchestration

In 2017, Deutsche Telekom IT took the first steps towards modernizing its processes by adopting a ‘partially agile’ development approach, working in three-month sprints.

“We created several processes to deliver small fixes faster, but it made life much more complex,” Tueting said.

All fixes had to be delivered together with larger change requests, which took considerable people-hours to accomplish. In addition, the organization was still struggling with the monolithic BPEL system, which didn’t allow for true agility.

That same year, Deutsche Telekom began investing in fiber optic cables. With this significant upgrade in hardware came the opportunity to revolutionize Deutsche Telekom IT’s outdated systems. The result was a complete change in both the operating system and DevOps approach, guided by three goals:

• Speed up: Change development from BPEL to Java and modus operandi from waterfall to agile
• Develop cross-functional teams: Change from skill-based teams to international cross-functional teams
• Increase efficiency: Increase development efficiency by using Camunda, Spring and other state-of-the-art technologies.

From one vendor to 43 frameworks

With these three goals in mind, Deutsche Telekom IT implemented a microservices-based architecture in the cloud, with Camunda engines running within many microservices.  According to Friedbert Samland, project manager IT application for Deutsche Telekom IT, the new system is comprised of :

• Microservices: This approach partitioned the monolith and allows for cross-functional work. There is no GUI; instead it is now a pure BPMN system. “Inspired by Camunda Co-Founder Bernd Ruecker’s microservices workflow automation cheat sheet , we run Camunda Engines in many microservices, talking directly to a message broker,” Friedbert said.
• Cloud: The power of the cloud dramatically reduces runtimes and enables a staged, fine-grained delivery approach. With no ready-made solution, Telekom IT designed its own Kubernetes-based approach.
• SAFe agile framework: Introducing a new organizational framework with shorter end-to-end cycle-times has enabled flexibility and speed.
• DevOps philosophy: Automation and self-service are key to Telekom IT’s DevOps philosophy, and ensure quality and speed.

Achieving process automation alignment

One of the greatest advantages of Deutsche Telekom IT’s Camunda revolution has been enabling ‘compliance-by-default.’ As a globally distributed business, with teams working across the world with multiple vendors and sensitive data, a highly automated solution was required. The resulting architecture now enables compliance-by-default and ensures data security.

Deutsche Telekom IT has also built its own internal process monitoring platform, inspired by the token concept employed in Camunda’s Cockpit, so users can see at-a-glance the progress of any process.

As well as supporting and operating a highly flexible DevOps philosophy, Camunda has enabled Deutsche Telekom IT to visualize complex logic in one place, easily align human and automated tasks, and use the same BPMN language for business and development.

For those who are thinking of following in Deutsche Telekom IT’s footsteps, Willm has sage advice: “Choose your stack wisely. Don’t start with a full stack; choose components that add the most benefits to your needs. Think big, start small, don’t try to get to the holy grail in the first attempt – evolve to where you want to be.”

Migrating a major financial services firm step by step

Consulting firm Doculabs works with many large financial services organizations to modernize their IT systems. Many of these firms build their own process automation platforms based on legacy BPMS. As they grow with time, these platforms become brittle and difficult to change.

Read More: Why You’re Struggling with Your BPM Suite

One major financial services firm wanted to overhaul both their front office (e.g. opening new accounts, moving money) and back office (e.g. compliance) process workflows. Ideally, they wanted to move these to a cloud-based process automation and orchestration platform, with the proper security and governance controls in place.

The first step in this process was inventorying each of the business processes across the firm, and bucketing them into “Small,” “Medium,” or “Large” categories. Determining these process sizes meant defining the rules, decision points, integrations and number of reports involved in moving workflows (as well as the approximate cost of each workflow). The team decided that the biggest initial wins would come from rebuilding the highest volume process types from scratch. It took the most time and effort to migrate the processes used day in and day out. While these processes were not the highest volume, it was important to migrate them to the new platform as soon as possible. Dormant processes with little to no volume were retired. 

F rom there, the Doculabs team built a business case for migrating from the legacy BPMS. They positioned the migration as a part of a larger modernization effort, and discussed the benefits of a modern business process automation platform for both the end user (consumers) and employees at the company. With the new system, the team would be able to modify and change how the firm serviced customers, reduce manual work, and complete workflows faster. After gaining initial buy-in from the firm’s leadership, the Doculabs team planted PoCs throughout the organization to prove that the new approach could work.

Doculabs worked to understand their process inventory, dissected and prioritized each workflow, and moved each process to the new environment by rank order of priority. Using their PoC process, they experimented with pulling workflows from the legacy system and migrating them to the new platform. Early signs were positive. Doculabs also re-engineered and modified certain workflows before they made their way to the new environment. 

As a general rule, their worked as follows: 

• If the process is broken or the technology is inadequate, re-engineer and recreate it
• If the process is working, but the technology is inadequate, recreate it (simplify, standardize, and reuse it wherever possible)
• If a process is working and the technology is adequate, move it “as is” (whenever possible). 

Once the Doculabs team had migrated the firm’s processes from the legacy BPMS to the new cloud-based platform, they saw an immediate improvement in collaboration between business and technical teams. Using BPMN as a common language and communication tool, both teams could easily see how processes worked, and how they could change for the better. On the new system, the financial services firm can now orchestrate human systems and automated processes together in a cohesive way. 

Lessons from a successful legacy BPMS to Camunda migration

Swiss Reinsurance Company (Swiss Re) successfully migrated from a legacy BPMS to a microservices-based orchestration platform using Camunda. Here are some of the key lessons they learned from their migration:

• Be persistent. It’s not enough to share information about the migration during a single advisory board session and expect people to understand everything. The goal is to get all of the key stakeholders to understand the dependencies and timelines associated with the migration. That happens with persistent communications.
• Try to understand the priorities of business stakeholder teams. Every team has its own projects and priorities. Aligning them at the outset of the migration process helps with the planning process.  
• Be optimistic about trusting the development team. Let go of old paradigms and assumptions. Trust that your team can transition to new ways of working. In Swiss Re’s case, dedicated BPM developers transitioned to Camunda, and were eager to learn new cloud-native development skills. 
• Be pessimistic about planning. Swiss Re’s migration was stalled by the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as some personal health matters with the team. In other words, expect the unexpected.
• Be realistic about limitations. That means setting priorities for what can happen right now, and what needs to happen in the future. For example, Swiss Re has built a future roadmap to self-heal applications, widen its user base, and allow superusers to create workflows in Camunda. In addition, they want to enhance reporting capabilities so users can understand where workflows need improvements. 

If you’ve made the decision to migrate from your legacy BPMS, congratulations! Modernizing these rigid systems to more flexible, developer-friendly, API-first platforms like Camunda can lead to better customer experiences, improved internal team productivity, faster development outcomes, and more. As you’ve seen from the examples above, successful organizations lay the groundwork in advance of a technical migration, and align their process automation strategy with leadership, IT and business stakeholders before taking on this significant shift.

From there, Big Bang migrations are often preferred over concurrently operating the legacy BPMS solution alongside Camunda. For Big Bang migrations, you have to remodel your processes into the proper BPMN 2.0 format, and migrate all existing process instances into the right state in Camunda, as described briefly above and in the Camunda Best Practices documentation. 

If you need some help along the way, reach out to the Camunda Consulting team. We’ve helped countless organizations migrate their processes from some of the most rigid, monolithic systems to Camunda. We’re happy to help steer your team through the entire migration process, from PoC to end product. 

Contact Camunda  to learn more.

Replace Legacy BPMS

If you’re struggling with a traditional business process management suite, Camunda can help.

Schedule a customized demo

Komatsu Case Study

I decided to choose the Komatsu case study due to the line of work I am in. I’m currently employed in the construction industry. As we all know Komatsu is a very large name within this field which is what grew my intrigue in this specific topic. We normally think of large machinery when we see this name but there is more to this multinational company than these massive machines. The case study was eye opening with the amount of technology and information that goes into the bigger picture within the organization. This case study dives more into the infrastructure of the company rather than the products and services it provides. What makes the company tick essentially and how they may be able to improve upon this through cloud computing.

There can be many advantages and disadvantages to companies utilizing cloud computing. Some advantages would include scalability. As far as this case goes though Komatsu wasn’t necessarily trying to achieve this with the integration of IBM’s Turbonomic hyrbrid cloud cost optimization solution. Cloud computing can promote work from home abilities being that anyone can access this from anywhere with an internet connection. Cloud computing can constantly update and maintain itself which would help with keeping manpower focused on more important things. IBM’s cloud optimization does this specifically allowing for a less manual approach. Although there are many advantages to cloud computing there is its set of disadvantages as well. Like anything with technology, the system could go down which would interrupt the day-to-day operations and require manpower to correct this issue. Another disadvantage could be the concern for privacy. With data and PII being on these networks there is always a high level of concern for security measures to keep this information protected.

If I was working for Komatsu I would agree with the IBM cloud solution. The solution has proven to be very effective. The big concern for me is that it doesn’t completely wipe out the workers’ jobs and is simply there to help aid in reducing the company’s exposure and profitability. This solution has proven to be effective by reducing user complaints to only ten tickets per year ( Komatsu | IBM ). This seems almost impossible with the sheer size of a company like that. The solution has proven cost effective by saving the company more than 650,000 dollars in savings in the public cloud ( Komatsu | IBM ). Ultimately, I agree with the decision to implement this cloud solution. It seems to be a great product that has increased profitability and work productivity.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.