LVM insurance is among the 20 leading insurance groups and one of the five largest car insurers in Germany. The company‘s headquarters are located in Münster.
In 2012 LVM Insurance launched two projects with Camunda almost simultaneously. The first of these projects was SOM (Service Order Management) which deals with internal administrative processes (ordering of hardware and software, relocation of employees, etc.). These processes are to a large extent manual operations, which is why a tailored task list was necessary.
The second project, given the name “inventory management life” was concerned with the asynchronous processing and management of inventory. Underwriting processes and calculations were released from the nightly batch and moved to the asynchronous processing sequence which is initiated from the online application. Individual records are then processed in a timely manner in the Camunda Process Engine.
The following interview was conducted with the team leader Thorsten Schramm and the IT Architect Carsten Piepel. Both work on the IT architecture in the IT infrastructure department at LVM Insurance.
“Project ‘SOM’: There were previously two different systems (an order and a processing system) that were operated parallel. The only integration interface was the user, who took on data using copy/paste. Editing did not proceed on the basis of a controlled process, but on the basis of a central document with the required data, to which all employees involved in the process had access, and who had observed this. The actual process was in the employees’ minds. Everyone knew when it was their turn and what they had to do.
Project ‘inventory management life’: Parts of the existing life-contract system were replaced by a new development. Asynchronous single processing should be used and has already been proven successful in other sectors (accident / legal protection). In these lines of business a well-known vendor’s heavy- weight BPM-system was used for service orchestration. Something lightweight was needed to reduce the complexity for both developers and for operations.”
“For SOM we didn’t want to rely on the previous BPMS – not least because of the high license costs. As we are very open-minded as a company towards open solutions, we looked at a few open process engines, tried them and got good responses very soon.
However, for our use in the enterprise area we still had to implement a lot ourselves. At this point Camunda stood out as particularly powerful. Further reasons for using Camunda were how lightweight it is, the developer knowledge required (only Java and BPMN, no SCA, BPEL, OSGI, etc.) and the attractive license model, as well as the competence of Camunda.
The decision to use the Camunda in the life project was heavily influenced by the initial experience in using the engine in the SOM project.”
“We encountered almost no challenges. As already mentioned, we only had to know Java and we had enough Java expertise within the company. BPMN was acquired quickly using Camunda’s entry seminar.”
“SOM and the individual processing in the life-project were introduced successfully and without any significant errors in the second quarter of 2014 and have been running stable and largely error-free since. All objectives have been achieved and a new project with Camunda has been set up. The existing single block processing in the area of accident and legal protection as well as property and motor damage, which were previously operated on the heavyweight BPMS, are successively converted to the Camunda engine. The accident and legal processes have been successfully put into operation in March 2015. The damage processes will follow.”
