How Deutsche Telekom scaled automation fast – using RPA and Camunda  Deutsche Telekom, one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies, manages one of Europe’s largest Robotic Process Automation (RPA) implementations, automating more than 450 processes managed by 3000 unattended bots. Despite achieving savings of more than EUR 93 million last year through RPA, Deutsche Telekom’s Service division, which takes care of 100 million customer requests each year, has embarked on a mission-critical journey to gradually transition from frontend to backend automation, replacing bots with APIs. Significant Scale Deutsche Telekom’s digital transformation journey began in 2015 as the business sought to tackle pain points in manual customer service processes, according to Vice President Service IT  Marco Einacker. However, with underlying...

True story: A recruiter quits his job, contributes to open source, gets a job as a software engineer.

Camunda BPM version 7.14 includes the option to turn on Telemetry as explained in this earlier blogpost. This anonymous data will be used to help us better understand what people are really doing with the engine and will make it easier for us to highlight the community influence on future roadmaps.  When any of us stakeholders bring new potential features to the table for an upcoming release, our opinion on its own isn’t enough to shift the roadmap. Any good proposal needs to be data-driven. At the moment, a lot of the data I bring along with my proposals comes from forum posts, individual requests on JIRA, and one-on-one conversations with community members at user groups or other events. This...

We’re just days away from CamundaCon Live 2020.2, the virtual conference dedicated to process and workflow automation. If you’re joining us this October 8 – 9, we’ve written, and recorded, this handy guide to help you make the most of this online experience and make sure you can connect to the wider Camunda Community. Here’s what you need to know Anything I need to do before joining CamundaCon Live? Join us today on our exclusive CamundaCon Live Slack channel – it’s live right now. This is where you can talk to Camunda experts including Camunda engineers and consultants, who’ll be on hand to answer any questions you have during the event. Plus you’ll be able to interact with other attendees,...

The Case for End-to-end Process Automation Processes are the algorithms that determine how an organization runs. Successful businesses grow from proven, effective processes. At Camunda, we have made it our mission to enable organizations to design, automate and improve these processes — no matter where they are and what they entail. Our ambition is to “automate any process, anywhere”.  Automation is not new, it is basically the core value of any software product. And if there was one single software product that could successfully run the entire operations of a company, there might not even be a need for Camunda. In fact, SAP tried to become that product in the 1990s. But although there are thousands of companies running SAP,...

How do you change peoples’ minds and kickstart digital projects, when businesses or teams are resistant to change?  Helsana is more than 100 years old and manages around 110million CHF insurance claims and payments each month. However, the company’s legacy, paper-based processes needed to evolve. Dr. Eric Euerlings, Helsana’s senior integration domain architect, said many of his colleagues had bad experiences with monolithic, centralized process engines in the past. Process owners and technologists were united in wanting to avoid the long hours of additional work, brittle code and expensive consultancy fees that plagued past process automation projects and, above all, they didn’t want another monolith. Changing peoples’ minds about modern, lightweight and flexible process automation wasn’t easy. So instead of...

Many recent mainstream media articles and popular books have raised alarms over anti-social algorithmic behavior, especially regarding machine learning and artificial intelligence. At CamundaCon LIVE 2020.2, we’re excited to introduce Dr. Micheal Kearns, professor in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss anti-social algorithms. In his CamundaCon LIVE keynote, Dr Kearns will address concerns including leaks of sensitive personal data by predictive models, algorithmic discrimination as a side-effect of machine learning, and inscrutable decisions made by complex models. He’ll explain the explosion of recent research in areas such as differential privacy, algorithmic fairness and algorithmic game theory, forging a new science of socially aware algorithm design and attempt to place them in a broader...

If you’re looking to selectively automate the work of individual components in legacy systems, and help automate processes without a significant time investment — RPA should be on your radar.  Global companies like Deutsche Telekom have already introduced and automated 2,500 individual bots, resulting in savings of more than 100 million Euros. However, relying too heavily on RPA can land you in hot water. Paul Jones, Business Automation Services at NatWest even classifies RPA as technical debt.  So what can you do to avoid this debt? Prevention is the best cure and before jumping on the RPA bandwagon, think carefully about whether you need an RPA solution, or a workflow engine. Losing control of long-running processes The ability to automate...