The Background
Over the past 150 years, Helvetia has grown to be a successful and international insurance group employing 6,700 people and serving 4.7 million customers. This Swiss company has its headquarters in St. Gallen and branches in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain, France and various other countries ensure its global presence. Its business focuses on private customers, small and medium sized enterprises and larger companies. Helvetia’s services include life and non-life insurance, tailored specialty line insurance coverage and reinsurance.
Since 2013, Helvetia has been using Camunda as an Embedded Engine in more than six Java EE applications productively and with an increasing tendency. The interview was carried out with Daniel Zigerlig (Software Engineer) and Andreas Eigenmann (Enterprise Architect) at Helvetia.
The Challenge
“Previously, no BPM system was being deployed in the Java environment, until mid-2012, when a new project raised new challenges: within the context of digitalisation, a central system for customer management had to be opened up to further channels. For instance, extended, automated and manual review processes had to be implemented for changes made to personal data. We also required specific information and processes that were dependent on how certain data was changed. In order to manage the processes during different types of events, a wide range of technical rules are required. We wanted to build a new central application that would store all assignment processes. These processes would review information and communicate with mailboxes according to the organizational structures in place. The department also required detailed reports on the processes and their tasks, for instance on throughput times.”
Why Camunda?
“During the evaluation, the following aspects were of importance:
- A good and easy integration into Java EE and our JBoss application server where possible
- Support of BPMN 2.0 as the primary notation
- Lightweight
- Simple deployment for Java developers
- Multi-client capability
- Easy interaction with a GUI application of our own Transaction management with two-phase-commit
- Good support
Evaluations were carried out for Red Hat JBoss BPM, Activiti and Camunda. Following a first analysis, we decided to carry out a proof of concept workshop with Camunda, during which different case studies would be implemented. Camunda provided instructions for this in the form of patterns.