Item: Camunda
Rating: 9
Author: Animesh Kumar

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Camunda Platform to manage business flow of an order that comes to us. An order would usually have one or more medical procedures attached to it. There are different steps in the journey of an order until it reaches a terminal state. Camunda Platform helps us managing that flow and getting visibility in the flow. It is very important to understand in which stage each order lies so that it can be worked out accordingly. Also, if there are any issues in the order, they get highlighted as incidents in Camunda BPMN and we can resolve them after an analysis.

Pros and Cons

Managing workflow of an order
Tracking of incidents
Visibility into each instance of business process/workflow
User task management
Integration with back-end microservices

Documentation - It is usually daunting for beginners because of lack of good documentation
Simplified setup on local machine for Camunda Server would help developers test changes quickly
Easier migration from one deployment version of a Camunda process to another deployment version would help in making changes and deploying them faster.
Heap memory management becomes issue at times resulting in stuck processes. This needs to be resolved.

Return on Investment

The positive impact is that we are able to ensure the business process is being followed and that results in orders getting processed successfully leading to customer satisfaction and revenue
Another positive impact is that we are able to track any anomalies and any errors in the order flow and retry them so that users don't have a negative experience.
A negative point is that it is an overhead to maintain so there is significant engineering effort getting invested there

Key Insights

Do you think Camunda delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Camunda's feature set?

Yes

Did Camunda live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Camunda go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Camunda again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Spring Boot, Bitbucket, IntelliJ IDEA, Apache Kafka, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)

Likelihood to Recommend

Camunda Platform is well suited for scenarios where there are different stages in a business flow and the flow is driven by user action at each stage. For example placing of an order on an ecommerce platform. Depending on whether user was able to make the payment or not the workflow would go to dispatch or retry stage. Now the retry stage would trigger further actions like sending follow up emails etc. Likewise, dispatch stage would have a different set of actions. Since every order is important and we need to know where it stands, using Camunda Platform is imperative. Camunda Platform might not be a right choice where just a one off thing needs to be done. For example, uploading of product information by user or periodic processing of heavy images by a worker. These are all either one step processes or periodic automated processes where we can track the status without using a business modeler like Camunda Platform.

Pros and Cons of Camunda Platform

Overall Satisfaction with Camunda Platform