Sparta Systems

Delivering Enterprise Quality Management Solutions to varying industries with automated business workflows

Industry:
software
Region:
North America

Key Benefits

  • Based on open standards and native support for BPMN 2.0
  • Designer/Modeler tooling available
  • Exposed APIs
  • Embeddability within our application or consumable as a service
  • Database support
  • Scalability and performance

Camunda Products

  • Camunda
  • Camunda Modeler

• Embedding Camunda in a software product
• Customizing the Modeler
• Letting business analysts create and deploy workflows

Background

For more than 20 years, Sparta Systems has helped customers bring products to market safely and efficiently by delivering enterprise quality management solutions (EQMS). These solutions provide control and transparency throughout an enterprise and its critical supplier network by focusing on optimizing quality, ensuring compliance, reducing risk and lowering cost.

Headquartered in New Jersey, Sparta Systems software solutions are designed based on best practices and configured to meet industry specific process requirements of verticals such as Pharmaceuticals, Medical Devices, Discrete Manufacturing and Consumer Products.

With over 750,000 users on its flagship EQMS product TrackWise, the de facto quality management standard for Life Sciences, Sparta Systems established the Quality Business Network foundation, which enables all ecosystem stakeholders to connect and collaborate on quality issues anywhere, anytime to improve operational efficiencies and overall business results.

Problem prior to using Camunda

»Our solutions automate quality business processes, so we set out to find an industry leading standard as well as a competent technology to manage workflows for all of our next generation cloud-based products (SaaS). We wanted to offer an out-of-the-box role with our software that enables business or compliance analysts to create and deploy business processes. While all of this could have been built internally, Sparta’s desire was to leverage 3rd party technology to take advantage of new features and functions without dedicating development resources to the effort.«

Alternatives and the selection of Camunda

»Several BPM products were evaluated. For our technology stack we opt for open standards wherever possible, as this provides greater flexibility for integration and possible technology swaps later on, and gives our customers the greatest flexibility to avoid “technology lock-in”. The following criteria were used in the evaluation process:

  • Open source/OEM friendly license; commercial licenses for production usage and support
  • Wide community adoption
  • Based on open standards and native support for BPMN 2.0
  • Designer/Modeler tooling available
  • Exposed APIs
  • Embeddability within our application or consumable as a service
  • Database support
  • Scalability and performance
  • Process versioning

Camunda met all of the criteria and was easily embeddable within our existing Java application. Camunda proved to be a great partner throughout the process. First, we were most impressed with the consultation the Camunda team provided during the evaluation phase, then their willingness and ability to understand our use cases, next their collaborative nature to get to a successful implementation, and finally our ability to influence their roadmap.

First, we were most impressed with the consultation the Camunda team provided during the evaluation phase, then their willingness and ability to understand our use cases, next their collaborative nature to get to a successful implementation, and finally our ability to influence their roadmap.
Judy Fainor, Chief Architect at Sparta Systems

Using Camunda’s technology and other subject matter experts we were able to encapsulate the process execution to a single layer within our platform code base. This allowed Sparta to focus on developing features that added business value related to quality management, while leveraging the years of investment the Camunda community had already invested in the BPMN technology.«

Project procedure and challenges

»An initial challenge was our own lack of BPMN best practices. We quickly realized we needed some training in this area and Camunda helped us to establish contact with training partners, which was invaluable. Once we understood BPMN 2.0 more clearly and learned the best practices, we were able to quickly gain in-house expertise and as a result became self-sufficient in creating new processes as needed by the business.«

Results with Camunda

»At this point Sparta has created its own Best Practices guide and trained personnel to successfully create, test and deploy processes outside of the R&D organization. We have worked closely with the Camunda development team on extending their web-based Modeler, for example by joining their development team in Germany. The outcome was a Sparta contribution to the open source project in the form of a customized BPMN 2.0 Modeler that would focus on specific modeling necessities for Sparta’s clients. At this point, creating new workflows and deploying them into the environment is almost an after- thought. Workflow modeling can be done by a business analyst and is now driving Sparta’s effort to facilitate business process collaboration across disparate quality management systems via the Quality Business Network.«

Similar Case Studies

How Atlassian is supporting enterprise-wide business process automation initiatives, spanning finance, commerce, marketing, customer support and more with the help of Camunda.
Orchestration of digital supply chain; Delivery of several hundred thousand digital orders each day; Operational transparency thanks to BPMN

Ready to get started?

Explore the platform or get a personal tour