I love to get some advice, whether camunda is the right plattform to cover our workflow automatization needs.
As far as I understood the whole concept of BPMN and Camunda as plattform to bring automatic workflows alive, camunda is able to send and receive information from a broad variety of systems and to process these information in a way that we call our worklfow.
I have some questions which I like to get an thought from your side to. Just to clarify: I am not a tech-guy, but from the business side - and trust to your technical knowledge.
Most of the new task are initiated by receiving emails or messages (e.g. task items in slack etc.) in a shared team inbox/slack board etc. Depending on the task, different programms are used to solve the issue (e.g. ERP for address changes, CRM for communication with customers, DAM for pictures etc), sometimes a combination of those. Is it possible to automatise the process of confirming that an email is received, read out the relevant information and open up a ticket in the required system as well as assign the task to a certain user? I am thinking about to use some kind of ai-tools to read out the message, stear the needed sla by semantic analysis and assign to the correct user etc.
Does camunda provide a gui, in which tasks can be done without opening the system required to process the information? The idea is to have “one gui for all systems for very basic tasks”, e.g. address change.
Does camunda provide a possibility to not just send and receive information but to start e.g. a calculation within another system without the user openened it? E.g. Calculating an unique product price by sending information as provided in the email to this system, trigger an calculation and receive the calculated price as well as further needed information (e.g. valid until …)?
In relation to 3., how do camunda tools measure the progress of a process step exercised in a productive system? Is it a measurment in a way of “sent information to system xy” = process step done or “system xy received information and proceeded a calculation/transaction”? The “concern” is, that process steps are assumed to be done because information are sent, not because something necessarily is proceeded.
Regarding the required api of the systems in use I feel some challenges ahead. These systems are specific for the econimic sector and sometimes kind of old fashioned and self-developed. What kind of api does camunda need to do the roughly scetched tasks above? Is there any kind of checklist which I can present to our IT guys to check how much effort a customizing would be to provide the needed functionality?
I guess, some of the answers to my questions could be found with more technological knowledge in the learn section. I am sorry if i ask some very basic questions and am happy about links to content that explains the issue for business guys …
Unfortunately, there exist some thoughts that camunda is as most of the used process tools in the past “almighty” until they are used in practice… So i need some information to convice my colleagues…
I think i need to answer these questions by first explaining that there is a big difference between what Camunda as a platform is responsible for and what can be achieved by using camunda.
Camunda orchestrates systems through maintaining and manipulating state.
The systems that Camunda orchestrates can do a wide variety of things. So while i may say something like “Camunda can ensure that an email can be sent to a user if they’re assigned a task” What camunda is doing is letting an email sending service know that a state has been reach which requires it to perform some kind of action.
Camunda itself can be triggered in a number way and a process can certainly be started or progressed when some kind of event occurs in another system. But it would be up to you to write that trigger.
Sure, you could have a process which between user task an external system is called and updated. Tasklist would be an example a GUI to be a centralized task oriented view of whats happened
Sure, you could write a JavaClass or call an external system that makes some kind of calculation and have camunda orchestrate that.
Each step for the process is completed with the service or user explicitly sends a “complete” call or when the service being called has finished running.
Generally speaking if you want to have a system speak to camunda it needs to be able to at least make a REST call.
If you would like Camunda to speak to a specific system it shouldn’t be a problem as long as it has some kind of API availalbe
