*Camunda Platform 8, our cloud-native solution for process orchestration, launched in April 2022. Images and supporting documentation in this post may reflect an earlier version of our cloud and software solutions.
For Covéa Insurance, a UK underwriting business of the French mutual insurance group Covéa, optimizing IT to improve user experience has always been a top priority. And as the needs of users evolved, so did Covéa’s thought process on how to most effectively utilize IT to solve challenges.
The company’s IT network relies on various legacy systems that a team of IT experts diligently maintains. As Covéa attempted to strengthen its competitive advantages in areas such as user experience, it became clear that a digital transformation was required to usher those legacy systems into a new age of IT automation.
During CamundaCon 2021, Covéa’s chief architect, Simon Hickling, spoke about some of the challenges that these legacy systems created. He also explained how solutions built with Camunda as the process engine have helped the company develop automated processes that have enabled the company to organize data more effectively, improve customer satisfaction, and build an even-stronger user experience.
Constantly Improving Processes
Historically, Covéa’s IT team led the decision making around technology and system investments. Leadership at Covéa soon realized that to build an even more effective user experience, IT and business operations should collaborate as much as possible. As the focus of the company’s IT efforts turned to automating processes, feedback from the operational team became invaluable.
“We used to be in a position where we did IT to the business, and software decisions were made by the IT department…then the idea became to computerize the manual processes that were done,” – Hickling said.
Today, IT and operations at Covéa work hand-in-hand to identify and implement software solutions that drive the company forward in computerizing and automating traditional processes. In order to most effectively create, implement, and customize those processes, Covéa relies on Camunda as its process engine.
Enabling Agile Development with Camunda
With the rise of social media platforms, e-commerce websites, and other web-based services, users have begun to expect a nearly flawless online experience. Any process inefficiency, no matter how minor, would not be tolerated by Covéa’s customers.
“Users know exactly what they want and they have an idea of how they think things should work for them as a business,” Hickling said.
In addition to improving user experience, Covéa wanted to offer all its customers — as well as its employees, partners, and third-parties — more insight into outcomes and data that impact business processes. This required the ability to take into account unique business outcomes when building automated processes. The customization offered by Camunda made it possible to improve user experience and build business processes for a variety of outcomes.
“What we found with Camunda is it allows processes to be revisited and brought into the world of Agile development,” Hickling said. “Our BPM systems now allow us to change the ‘how’ without adversely impacting business outcomes.”
The agility enabled by Camunda has helped the IT experts of Covéa move past the stage of maintaining hardware and into a new era of designing custom, automated solutions.
“We can design something ourselves that works exactly how we want, or we can just make it rough and ready,” Hickling said. And when something works, “then we’ve found an efficiency that we can make the most of using Camunda.”
Better Insights + Process Automation = Happy Users
By transforming its legacy system into end-to-end process automation, Covéa has gained better insights into data and saved time and money for the organization. Most importantly, the company has been able to build customizable user experiences that satisfy its customers.
“With Camunda, we can see what’s gone into the decision making process when building process automation. We can see what went into the decision and what was the outcome,” Hickling said. “But the most important thing it offers is giving us the ability to overwrite that and make individual process decisions for every customer.“
Ready for results? Get started with a Camunda free trial and experience some of the possibilities process automation can deliver to your organization.
