Provinzial—Mastering the Center of Excellence

A German public insurance company, Provinzial Insurance Company is one of the 10 largest companies in the country with about 5 million customers, 12,000 employees, and 1,000 people in the IT department. At CamundaCon 2023, André Wickenhöfer from Provinzial, Björn Brinkmann from BBHT Consulting, and their Camunda customer success manager Leon Strauch shared how Provinzial scaled its solutions across not only the IT department but the entire business with their center of excellence (CoE).

Wickenhöfer noted that when he thinks about maturity in business process management, he uses Camunda’s maturity model to think about it in four separate steps:

1. Single project
2. Broader initiative
3. Distributed adoption
4. Strategic, scaled adoption

The fourth and final stage encompasses end-to-end orchestration of mission-critical processes. This enables vast parts of the organization, both technical and nontechnical, to strategically leverage digital transformation.

Strauch noted that he had a conversation with an executive at a big enterprise who wanted to get to the fourth stage, but when he suggested the way to get there was through a center of excellence (CoE), the executive was “not amused.” This leader didn’t want to have a bottleneck in their organization, nor did they want a centralized team that slowed everything down, nor governance police. They wanted to take a completely different approach.

A CoE can indeed be challenging, and everyone has seen them fail in the past. The reason CoEs fail is they don’t provide sufficient value in the organization, and when they centralize the wrong activities and become a bottleneck.

But these pitfalls shouldn’t deter leaders from setting up a CoE. It just signifies that you need to find a proper structure that reflects your organizational culture, your goals, and where you want to go with process automation. In other words, you’ve got to find the right CoE for your organization.

Defining a center of excellence for process orchestration

A CoE for process orchestration is a dedicated team of IT and project management experts that enables strategic adoption of process orchestration. With business processes orchestrated end to end, companies should see increased efficiency, improved customer experience, and greater business agility.

This is a broad definition, because what a CoE really comes down to is how it’s set up. The right structure for the CoE is critical. Typically, there are two kinds of CoE models in the market: centralized and decentralized.

More or less the classic approach, a centralized CoE is really a delivery team of automation projects. It automates processes on request by the business, hands them back over to the business, then continues with the next project.

This approach can indeed become a bottleneck. A single team will inevitably slow things down—the approach simply won’t scale. But it can make sense in some instances, for example if you’re a small organization, if you’re not as mature yet on your digital transformation journey, or if there’s a strong divide between business and IT.

A more mature CoE is the federated or decentralized model. In this context, the CoE is more like an accelerator, an enabler—the delivery itself takes place in the business domain. Agile, cross-functional teams own their own value streams and make their own autonomous tech decisions. They don’t want to be slowed down by a CoE; they want to be enabled by it, and they want to become quicker and improve the time to value.

And it’s how Provinzial set up their CoE to avoid becoming a bottleneck.

What should a center of excellence do?

In most organizations, CoEs do one of four things.

First, they provide the right tools—a hyper-automation tech stack, maybe even as a centralized platform, so the infrastructure can be centralized.

Second, they standardize how to use those tools. This establishes best practices that can benefit everyone. A CoE should nurture and build a community where teams can learn from each other and share their best practices.

Third, they can provide accelerators, like Connectors, libraries, or integrations into user task management or into your data warehouse. These accelerators help delivery teams get into the business logic much faster.

Fourth, they also enable and build automation skills. What good are tools if you don’t have people able to use them? Through training and e-learning, CoEs can enable business and IT teams to create a process-first mindset in the organization.

Organizations can also set up a hybrid approach. The CoE might support projects closely in the beginning and then fade out later. Ultimately, what’s super important is communication and showcasing value.

Achieving Provinzial’s center of excellence goals with Camunda

Brinkmann noted that Provinzial had four major things they wanted to achieve with Camunda and workflow automation.

1. Convert their function-based application structure to an architecture landscape. They wanted their business users to focus on value-creating tasks.
2. Have end-to-end, customer-centric processes to meet customer needs and give them more transparency about process status.
3. Have more flexible, configurable processes to reduce time to market.
4. Close the business-IT gap. If you want to have customer-centric processes and you want to have them configurable, you have to get business and IT together.

Wickenhöfer, Brinkmann, and Strauch described one process implemented this way at Provinzial—a process for broken car window claims.

To this complex end-to-end process, they first introduced business rules management. That was necessary to give the business users the ability to adjust the business rules by themselves.

Next, they integrated external service providers. In this case, Provinzial needs to check that an invoice is correct with a service provider, so that process has to be integrated. This could sometimes be complex because it could take two or three days to get an answer about the invoice. Provinzial was able to handle the different events with external service handlers with BPMN and Camunda.

Finally, they added user task handling. Right in the beginning of this process, the policy needs to be identified. A typo in the policy number usually meant you wouldn’t be able to manage that process automatically, but with a user task and a special interface for that scenario, your business user can adjust the typo and the rest of the process can be automated.

Brinkmann said that these were three major capabilities his team achieved with Camunda and workflow automation.

How Provinzial scaled the approach

Brinkmann noted that one of the first things they learned was that workflow automation with Camunda isn’t just a BPMN model and the code—it’s so much more. Provinzial now has several templates and standards for documentation and specification. They’ve also created modeling guidelines that define readable and understandable processes.

Last but not least, they have their user tasks in Oracle Siebel, allowing them to provide the status of the process to the user.

Tooling is important as well. When the Provinzial team models a process, they do that in the Camunda Modeler.

To address testing, Provincial built something like an automated DMN test tool which makes it easy to specify test cases. They use SoapUI for testing the process interface and to test the process itself. Robot frameworks allow them to work with all the variances. Execution is handled by the workflow engine and the DMN engine, and the user task integration is in Oracle Siebel.

A centralized Commodore cockpit monitors, analyzes, and optimizes processes for their users.

Provinzial also wanted to enable the users or the teams of each business domain to build up the processes by themselves. Now, a large digitalization program provides a new customer portal where all the processes are built up with Camunda. The CoE guides the different teams to build the processes, an approach Provinzial found to be very successful.

In order to enable and continuously support the company, IT and business have to work together. It  makes no sense to just put technology into the automation tech stack and tell the teams to use it.

To bring these skills together and achieve the results Provinzial needed, they had to foster a strong community, enabled by a CoE that let the teams influence each other.