On Monday a case opens. By Wednesday new evidence lands. By Friday a manager injects an escalation. The work spans weeks, crosses systems and teams, and needs room for judgment. Static workflows crack under that load. Camunda’s new whitepaper, “Managing the Complexities of Long‑Running Case Processes with Camunda,” shows how agentic orchestration keeps control and momentum without locking you into rigid paths to address your case management requirements.
Why this matters
Enterprises care about cycle time, SLA adherence, and compliance. Long‑running cases challenge all three because reality often changes mid‑flight: new documents arrive, roles shift, additional information is needed, and decisions evolve. This whitepaper shows how Camunda’s process orchestration delivers the required durable state, builds in human-in-the-loop oversight, and uses AI to guide and support dynamic next steps. With Camunda for case management, you can stay flexible without sacrificing governance.
Key highlights from the whitepaper
Some key highlights from the whitepaper include:
- Long‑running, persistent state with Zeebe. Cases can pause on user tasks, timers, and external messages, then resume exactly where they left off with full context. That means fewer dropped balls and more predictable SLAs.
- Agentic orchestration via BPMN ad-hoc sub‑processes. Let AI agents determine tasks at runtime while caseworkers add or remove work when reality changes. You maintain a clean model and a complete audit trail of when, what, and why tasks were executed.
- Decisioning with DMN. Externalize routing and policy logic so assignments adapt to case context without hard‑coding. This lowers backlog risk when priorities or data change.
- Humans as first‑class collaborators. Humans can participate in the process for escalations, approvals, exception handling, and more. People provide guardrails; AI accelerates routine work.
- Visibility and control for operations. You have access to in-flight troubleshooting using the same model as the one executed, and access to controlled process instance modification with role based access control (RBAC). Camunda also offers dashboards for bottlenecks, SLA monitoring, and compliance reporting.
- Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). Orchestrate extraction and classification with your preferred LLMs while keeping exceptions in the loop. This turns paperwork into structured data you can act on.
- Long‑term memory for AI. Retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) lets agents pull prior history from vector stores and write outcomes back, improving recommendations over time.
Enterprise architect’s viewpoint
From an enterprise architecture standpoint, Camunda’s cloud-native workflow and decision engine, Zeebe, provides a durable, distributed state so you always know the status of your case. You can expand your case processing by taking advantage of a wide range of out-of-the-box connectors to reach EHR, claims, ERP, policy, CRM, and other systems.
As you implement AI to handle the dynamic flow associated with case management, you can add support from RAG for long-term memory and IDP for document ingestion. Keeping the required checks and balances in the process, you can keep humans in the loop with Camunda Tasklist, and then use our Operate and Optimize components for control and insight into the case.
And for reliability, you can design service tasks, configure retries, and use correlation keys to route events correctly. Pair timers for SLAs with message events for asynchronous integrations so work does not stall and deadlines are not missed. You glue all this together with a single BPMN model that is consistent from design to runtime.
As an architect, governance is of the utmost importance and you need this at scale without disruption. You can apply versioning to your processes and use Camunda’s instance migration to update definitions without pausing your long-running cases. All of this can be done while restricting ad-hoc entry points and instance changes with RBAC, and persist who did what, when, and why to maintain a defensible audit trail.
Get the paper
If your cases span people, systems, and weeks of change, this whitepaper shows how to blend flexibility with governance to deliver results at scale. Ready to map this into your landscape? Check out the whitepaper: “Managing the Complexities of Long‑Running Case Processes with Camunda.”
Try it yourself
Take a few minutes before or after reviewing the whitepaper and watch the demo: Agentic orchestration in action. Or even take it a step further and spin up a Camunda 8 environment and experiment with a simple case, an ad-hoc sub‑process for optional tasks, and a small DMN table for routing.
Start the discussion at forum.camunda.io