Camunda vs. Traditional BPM Systems

Modern business is increasingly dependent on digital technologies to optimise internal processes, reduce costs and speed up service delivery. One of the key tools in this direction is BPM (Business Process Management) systems. They provide process automation, workflow management and business optimisation, helping to increase process efficiency.

Among the various solutions on the market, Camunda, a modern platform for workflow automation, business process orchestration and system integration, occupies a special place. In this article, we'll have a look at what Camunda is, how it differs from traditional BPM systems, and how it can benefit companies that have embarked on a digital transformation journey.

An overview of BPM systems and their importance to modern business

Business Process Management (BPM) systems were developed in response to the need for organisations to effectively manage complex processes involving many stages, participants and resources. In today's world, where competition is ever-increasing and customers expect fast and high-quality service, BPM systems have become an indispensable tool for companies striving for continuous improvement.

The main functions of BPM systems are:

• Business process modelling - creating visual diagrams that show the sequence of actions, participants involved, decision rules and dependencies between stages;
• Automation and monitoring - putting repetitive or routine processes into automatic mode, reducing the number of human errors and allowing continuous real-time monitoring of the status of tasks;
• Performance analysis and optimisation - collecting data on the operation of processes, identifying bottlenecks, calculating key performance indicators (KPIs) and developing solutions for improvement.

By implementing BPM systems, companies can:

1. speed up the execution of tasks through clear regulation and automation;
2. reduce the cost of manual processing of documents and data;
3. improve the quality of services by standardising procedures and monitoring compliance;
4. provide flexibility in responding to market and legislative changes by quickly making adjustments to existing processes.

Key features of modern BPM solutions include

• support for BPMN 2.0 (Business Process Model and Notation), an international standard for describing business processes that allows you to create clear and versatile models;
• use of DMN (Decision Model and Notation) to describe business rules and decision-making logic, which allows for flexible changes to the rules without interfering with the process itself;
• use of CMMN (Case Management Model and Notation) to manage cases, i.e. non-standard situations where human involvement is required for decision-making.

These standards provide transparency, unify approaches, and greatly simplify the integration of BPM systems with other enterprise solutions such as CRM, ERP, document management or analytics. This provides companies with centralised process management, a clear view of resource utilisation and the ability to quickly adapt to new conditions.

Explaining the role of Camunda as a flexible BPM platform for automating and orchestrating business processes

Camunda is an open source platform focused on business process automation, service orchestration, workflow management and DMN business rules implementation. It supports BPMN 2.0, DMN and CMMN standards, enabling organisations to model and implement both simple and highly complex processes.

Unlike many traditional BPM systems, Camunda has a lightweight, modular architecture that allows you to quickly scale your solution, easily integrate processes and flexibly adapt business logic to specific tasks. This makes it particularly attractive for companies undergoing digital transformation.

Comparing traditional BPM systems with innovative solutions such as Camunda

Traditional BPM systems that emerged in the 2000s were primarily focused on large enterprises and operated as 'monoliths'. They typically had closed code, cumbersome architecture and limited integration capabilities, making it difficult to adapt to change. Their main weaknesses are:

• Difficulty of customisation - any changes or enhancements required significant time and resources;
• High licensing costs - high cost, vendor dependency, expensive upgrades;
• Difficulty integrating with new technologies, especially microservice architectures, cloud services and API ecosystems.

Modern solutions like Camunda have emerged as an answer to these limitations. Camunda offers:

• A flexible, process-oriented architecture that is easily scalable from small teams to distributed enterprise systems;
• Support for orchestration of both business logic and technical services - allowing you to build complex chains of interactions between people, systems and robots.
• Open source and extensive integration capabilities - open source gives organisations full control, flexibility in configuration and the ability to connect to modern stacks (e.g. Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Kafka, REST, GraphQL);
• Support for modern standards (BPMN, DMN, CMMN), ensuring transparency of processes, ease of modelling and a consistent approach across the organisation.

In addition, Camunda actively supports hybrid scenarios, such as working simultaneously in on-premises and cloud environments, which is especially important for companies that are gradually moving to the cloud. Camunda's innovative approaches enable faster implementation of changes, increased business agility and shorter time-to-market for new products.

What is Camunda, and how is it different from traditional BPM systems?

Camunda is:

• A business process automation platform that allows you to design, implement and monitor processes;
• A service orchestrator that enables interaction between microservices, APIs and external systems;
• a workflow management system that allows you to control the progress of tasks and their completion.

Traditional BPM systems:

• Typically have a heavy, monolithic architecture;
• Limit the ability to customise business processes;
• Require significant effort to set up and integrate;
• Do not always support modern standards and technologies.

Camunda uses the open standards BPMN, CMMN and DMN, which allows you to:

• easily change process logic
• Integrate with microservices and other modern platforms;
• Ensure scalability and adaptability.

The main advantages of Camunda compared to traditional BPM systems are:

• Flexibility and customisation. Camunda allows you to adapt business processes to the specific needs of your company, whereas traditional BPM systems often force you to work according to predefined templates.
• Open Source and integration with other systems. Thanks to its open source code, Camunda can be easily integrated with microservices, REST APIs, databases and analytical systems, making process integration easier.
• Modular approach. Camunda allows you to implement different components separately: DMN business rules, workflows, analytics, making it possible to deploy the solution in stages.
• Scalability. Camunda works seamlessly in a containerised environment (Docker, Kubernetes) and supports scaling to large volumes of data, which is often lacking in traditional systems.
• Adaptation to modern technologies. Camunda is focused on the modern stack - microservices, cloud solutions, streaming data processing - making it an ideal choice for companies seeking to digitally transform.

Traditional BPM systems: their limitations and issues

• Limited flexibility. Many legacy BPM systems were designed for a time when business processes did not change as often. They do not take into account today's need for flexible adaptation, so that even a small change in business logic often requires complex modifications, the involvement of developers, additional testing or even a complete redesign of processes. This makes such systems slow to change and stifles innovation.
• Difficulty of integration. Closed platforms usually have their own (often outdated) APIs or even use internal data formats that do not meet modern standards. This makes it difficult to integrate with other enterprise systems, especially cloud services, microservices or external platforms. In addition, integration often requires additional modules or specialised connectors, adding to the cost and implementation time.
• High cost. Licences for traditional BPM solutions can cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars per year. This is on top of the cost of implementation, configuration, upgrades and support. In comparison, solutions such as Camunda offer a free open-source version with extensive functionality, while paid versions have more flexible pricing and allow gradual scaling according to business needs.
• Difficult to use. The interfaces of many older systems are outdated, with confusing navigation and poor ergonomics. This leads to lengthy staff training, frequent operational errors, reduced productivity and the need for ongoing technical support. In addition, legacy systems often lack modern monitoring and analysis tools, making it difficult to control processes and identify bottlenecks on time.

How does Camunda help to optimise business processes?

1. Data Analysis and Process Monitoring. Camunda has powerful built-in analysis and monitoring tools that allow real-time monitoring of business processes at all levels - from individual tasks to the big picture. Thanks to detailed dashboards, event logs and visualisations, users can quickly find bottlenecks, identify delays, evaluate team performance and analyse data to make informed decisions. You can not only react to problems, but also prevent them by predicting and modelling optimisation opportunities.
2. Workflow automation. With Camunda, organisations can automate routine tasks such as reviewing documents, updating system records, sending notifications, approving requests and more. This reduces the time it takes to complete tasks, reduces the risk of manual errors and increases overall process efficiency. Automating processes also frees up staff to focus on more value-added tasks, such as strategic planning or customer service.
3. Integration with Microservices and APIs. Camunda is designed to work in modern IT architectures, including microservice environments. It can be seamlessly integrated with existing systems using REST APIs, gRPC, Kafka and other protocols. This allows you to orchestrate the interaction between different services, centrally manage business logic, and ensure that all components work in concert. This approach helps increase the scalability, flexibility and adaptability of the business to market changes. This approach helps increase the scalability, flexibility and adaptability of the business to market changes.
4. Modelling and optimisation. In addition to the technical part, Camunda allows business analysts and managers to model and test processes before they are implemented. Thanks to support for BPMN, DMN and CMMN standards, you can create transparent and understandable models, test their effectiveness, analyse the impact of changes and implement optimisations without risking real work. This significantly reduces the time it takes to adapt to the business and enables rapid innovation.

Examples of how Camunda is used in practice

Financial Institutions

Automation:

• Loan approval processes;
• Transaction verification for regulatory compliance;
• Risk management through DMN business rules.

Retail

Supply chain business process orchestration:

• Automated order confirmation;
• Logistics management;
• Integration with third-party suppliers via API.

Healthcare sector

Automation:

• Patient records processing;
• Medical Case Management (CMMN);
• Monitoring of service quality and efficiency of hospital processes.

Case Study: UKRSIBBANK transforms its lending process with Camunda

Customer:

UKRSIBBANK BNP Paribas Group, operating in Ukraine, launched a large-scale digital transformation of its lending processes in 2021. The main objective was to overcome the challenges posed by legacy systems, manual processes and a lack of standardisation.

Initial challenges:

Before implementing Camunda, the bank faced some challenges:

• Fragmented systems: Credit analysts had to work across multiple platforms - separately entering financial data, calculating credit scores, checking data in the core banking system, and emailing requests to colleagues.
• High risk of error: manual processes led to delays, inaccuracies and inconsistent quality of applications.
• Poor communication with customers: the lack of transparency and speed of the process could lead to customer frustration.

Solution: Implementation of Camunda

UKRSIBBANK implemented the Camunda business process orchestration platform with the help of Integrity Vision.

Key steps:

• Single window: combining all processes in a single interface, minimising manual data entry and speeding up work.
• Process orchestration: thanks to Camunda, tasks became clearer, more controlled and less prone to human error.
• Standardisation: the introduction of uniform work rules, transparent roles and responsibilities helped to avoid variations in the quality of applications.
• Dashboards and analytics: Camunda collects real-time data, allowing management to identify bottlenecks, track KPIs and SLAs, and make informed strategic decisions.

Results:

• Increased efficiency: the processing time for SME applications has been reduced from 28 days to 12 days, with a target of 5 days, in line with market best practice.
• Increased customer satisfaction: the process has become fully transparent and available online, including the signing of documents, without the need to visit a branch.
• Employee motivation: less manual work means employees can focus on value-added tasks. In addition, the transparency of KPIs encourages a sense of ownership and commitment.
• Strategic insight: Camunda data helps to identify trends, predict challenges and continuously improve processes.

Looking to the future:

UKRSIBBANK has already begun migrating to Camunda 8 in 2024 to ensure even greater flexibility and readiness for change. Plans for the coming years include

• Integration of CRM, ERP and core banking systems;
• Increasing the share of digital sales to 20% in the corporate lending segment;
• 11-fold growth in the SME portfolio.

The implementation of Camunda was a key step in UKRSIBBANK's digital transformation. It enabled the bank to:

• Reduce application processing time
• Improve the quality of customer service
• Increase employee motivation
• Gain a strategic advantage through analytics and transparency.

Anna Ivanova, Head of Corporate Lending, UKRSIBBANK, points out:

“Our customers want to get money now, or maybe even yesterday. We need to engage the client, show them the process and allow them to submit and receive all the documents on the spot. We need to make the process fast and as simple as possible”.

This case study shows how banks can use process orchestration to create a more efficient, agile and competitive environment.

Conclusion

Camunda is an innovative tool that enables companies to:

• Implement process automation and system integration at a modern level.
• Reduce the time to complete tasks.
• Improve process control and management.
• Achieve digital transformation quickly and flexibly.

Although traditional BPM systems are still in use, they are far inferior to Camunda in terms of scalability, openness, integration and customisation.

For companies looking for business optimisation, flexibility and readiness for modern technological challenges, Camunda is the natural choice. It allows you to:

• Implement a process-oriented architecture.
• Build processes based on BPMN, DMN and CMMN.
• Orchestrate microservices and APIs.
• Ensure efficient orchestration of business logic.

Camunda is not just a BPM system - it's an ecosystem that enables organisations to be future-ready.

Need advice on implementing Camunda? Contact us today, and our experts will advise you - marketing@integrity.com.ua.