Camunda Accelerator Program
BavariaDirekt, a direct insurer of the Sparkassen Finanzgruppe, has been providing affordable, tailor-made insurance products for over 15 years. Their success is a result of attention to customers’ needs, transparency throughout the insurance process, and putting customers at the center of everything they do.
The transparency that the company demonstrates toward its customers should also apply to internal processes. To improve visibility into their operations and modernize their enterprise architecture, BavariaDirekt selected Camunda’s open, composable, and intelligent platform as a foundation for change.
BavariaDirekt was facing familiar challenges: spaghetti architecture, disconnected processes and automations that trapped data and hard-coded logic within the business process, as well as legacy enterprise solutions that were at the end of their lifecycle. These challenges led to limited data usage, suboptimal experiences for customers and employees, and an architecture that was difficult to maintain and improve.
As Mirek Sindler, Head of Data, IT, and Digital Processes, explains, “We had a high dependency on IT services. Changes were complex, expensive, and took a long time, and there was also no overall strategy for end-to-end automation of processes.”
The workflow for developing, implementing, and maintaining new business processes was similarly challenging. Gaps existed between documentation and delivered solutions, and if there was an operational issue, BavariaDirekt’s IT Dev team were the only persons capable of finding defects and fixing code.
These combinations of challenges could eventually lead to a competitive disadvantage in the fast-paced insurance industry, especially given insurance organizations’ increasing reliance on automation and digital processes. BavariaDirekt needed a solution to help them modernize operations now and be adaptable for future needs.
With the help of Camunda’s Accelerator Program (ProSA), BavariaDirekt implemented Camunda as an orchestration layer within their tech stack to control and automate processes. They also used the implementation as an opportunity to re-engineer legacy processes. “We started with simple processes just to learn and get more familiar with the technology,” says Mirek.
One of the first end-to-end processes BavariaDirekt re-engineered was for insurance rescission, which involves the retroactive cancellation of an insurance policy and return of paid premiums. The team took advantage of Camunda’s REST API connectors to connect older and newer systems across processes from end to end, streamlining workflows and solving for aging, legacy, and disparate architecture.
The project went live quickly and on schedule, which Mirek attributes in part to the outstanding support from Camunda’s Accelerator program: “Jonathan from ProSA helped us get started, get a foundation, provided orientation, and explained best practices. He helped us build out our infrastructure inhouse, since our inhouse development team did not have any experience with Camunda 8. Camunda’s Accelerator program was very helpful in getting us started very quickly.”
With Camunda, BavariaDirekt aims to automate almost all of its online processes and workflows. The first processes implemented, which mostly contain unstructured input from physical mail, achieved an automation rate of around 88%. These automations led to significantly faster turnaround times for BavariaDirekt and continue to contribute to increased customer satisfaction. The company also saves time by digitizing and automating manual processes.
According to Mirek, the main advantage of implementing Camunda’s process orchestration and automation is that “we can do it ourselves. We don’t have to wait for IT developers to make changes. This allows us to develop new processes faster now.”
Due to the success of this first project, BavariaDirekt has set up a digital processes department to expand the use of Camunda and further develop end-to-end processes. The team can now put new processes into operation three to four times faster.
David Lehmann, Manager of Digital Processes, adds that another benefit of Camunda is visibility into BavariaDirekt’s architecture and their end-to-end operations, which is critical to optimizing performance. “With Operate and Optimize, we can see the processes running in the system and actually act every day, in the moment, and decide if changes are needed or a specialist is needed.This was not possible in the old system. In the old system we needed IT to find where the process was stopped, decode it, then start again. Now, it’s much easier and faster.”
Camunda gives BavariaDirekt the right capabilities to overcome legacy system constraints and reliance on IT. “The orchestration of individual applications and one-to-one connection gives our architecture flexibility for the future,” says Mirek, “especially for the changes that are coming. It is a good feeling to know we can adapt very quickly and do it ourselves with a low-code approach.”
“Especially valuable is the support from Camunda,” adds Mirek. Camunda Consulting experts worked with BavariaDirekt to tailor a team to their implementation needs, helped them select the right lighthouse project, and conducted individual training on all applications for all levels—all to ensure a successful project start.
BavariaDirekt continues to streamline operational processes for their Automotive,Liability, Accident, and Property lines of business. They are building new dashboards to track KPIs and are reusing composable elements to scale process automations. They also plan on implementing Camunda’s RPA feature to connect old and new systems.
Other projects at the top of the roadmap include connecting the claims system, improving claims processes, and evaluating opportunities to use agent-based orchestration to dynamically solve multi-step tasks, such as those involved in identity verification.
