Camunda Platform
Panasonic Europe B.V., a subsidiary of the global Panasonic Group, serves a wide range of customers across Europe through its consumer electronics, home appliance, automotive, and B2B solutions. With over 11,000 employees and diverse operations, the company coordinates workflows across manufacturing, logistics, sales, HR, and IT functions—all while integrating with core enterprise systems like SAP.
Managing such operational complexity requires agility and a high level of process standardization. For Philipp Jahn, Senior Manager of Workflow, Web, and PIM Consulting, this meant finding a way to modernize legacy workflows and centralize process orchestration without adding more technical debt.
“We needed to replace our legacy systems with a new workflow management system,” says Philipp Jahn. “We wanted to digitize approvals, centralize tasks, and improve the user experience for our internal approvals processes. The new system needed to integrate with multiple, specific ERP systems and support migration of SAP R/3 workflows to SAP S/4HANA. It had to be able to integrate different versions of these SAP environments into one, central platform.”
Panasonic lacked full process visibility for complex approval processes with multiple steps, making compliance and traceability difficult. It also took a long time to implement new processes within various workflow and SAP systems.
As Philipp Jahn explains, “The managers that were responsible for approvals wanted a more streamlined process. They didn’t want to have to log into the SAP system to search for the right transaction. They wanted a system where they could more easily see their tasks and all the required information, make the approval, and be done.”
With the sunsetting of old workflow systems on the horizon and the company’s IT focus on migrating from SAP R/3 to S/4HANA, the time was right to implement a new platform that simplified SAP integration and streamlined approval processes to improve usability, transparency, and traceability.
Panasonic selected Camunda to serve as the orchestration and execution layer of its enterprise workflow platform. Camunda’s open architecture, standards-based BPMN and DMN modeling, and flexible integrations enabled the team to decouple workflow logic from SAP. The platform’s capability to handle both simple and complex approvals made it the right fit for Panasonic’s hybrid ERP environment, helping unify workflows across organizations without duplicating logic in each system.
Panasonic initially worked with partner Holisticon to develop the platform and implement simple approval workflows. Then, business analyst Philip Joschko from partner cimt AG continued migrating low-complexity approval workflows out of the legacy systems, collecting requirements and mapping processes into BPMN and DMN models. “We continued shifting the low-hanging fruits, the non-SAP workflows,” says Philip Joschko, “and then step-by-step integrated a workflow that one internal customer already had in the legacy system. When these systems were sunsetting, we finally switched to the Camunda platform and created business objects for similar workflows. For example, we built one business object for HR workflows, and everything that is a bit similar is collected there.”
Other internal customers saw that the Camunda workflow was implemented and could be reused for their processes. “It was a ‘learn while we walk’ approach,” adds Philipp Jahn. “We started by first getting acquainted with Camunda itself and how the BPMN and DMN works. Once that was running stable and safe, we began integrating our enterprise systems, migrating more systems to SAP S/4HANA, then integrating more SAP environments with one, central platform.”
Because Panasonic Europe B.V. has different versions of SAP in place, Philipp’s team uses OData APIs to create an abstraction layer, which makes it easier to integrate with SAP. Explains Philipp Jahn, “The benefit of decoupling the process layer is you might just have small pieces to adjust when migrating the ERP system. The process layer is not affected. For the user, there is not much of an impact because the UI didn’t change that much. So, less impact for developers and users.”
One use case example of how the Camunda orchestration and execution layer is improving end-to-end processes and delivering a better user experience is the way Panasonic Europe B.V.’s users create a business partner in SAP S/4HANA. In the legacy systems, it was not an intuitive process. The workflow included multiple emails from different stakeholders, manual data input in Excel spreadsheets, and manual validation of data by a master data team. It was disjointed, confusing, and made it challenging to show all steps taken in an audit process. The new Camunda-powered business process guides stakeholders via a Camunda web form and automatically validates data against SAP, which is used as the source of truth. Every step is logged and auditable, improving usability and making it easier to show auditors what was requested and approved.
With Camunda as the orchestration and execution layer, Panasonic Europe B.V. now has one, central platform for process flows. The company is running more than 220,000 workflow instances through Camunda each year, supporting over 600 differentiated process request types, and serving users across multiple business units and countries.
Key outcomes include:
“Now, with Camunda, we are bringing business process analysts and SAP developers closer together, and each party sees the benefit,” explains Philipp Jahn. “The workflow people don’t need to deal with the intricacies of SAP, and the SAP developers don’t have to deal with process modeling. It’s mutually beneficial.”
Panasonic Europe B.V. continues to leverage digitization and automation as a competitive differentiator. The Content and Workflow team is focused on replacing legacy systems and automating long, manual processes. “We recently integrated an external SaaS system into the process and are using Camunda to make API calls into the system to validate bank account information,” says Phillipp Jahn. “We’re hoping to cut the process time from 3 to 6 weeks to 3 to 6 days.”
The team is also building more detailed measurements into the workflow system to provide users better metrics on volume, speed, and bottlenecks. Additionally, their plan includes building agents into the system to ask questions related to workflows by pushing all the data into an OpenSearch database that would be used for workflow queries.
