By Andrei Karabovich on 4 september 2024
Since 2015, Vandebron has been using Salesforce. At the time, Salesforce for Vandebron, was like a Swiss Army knife - versatile, multifunctional, and seemingly capable of addressing most of the business requirements. It quickly became the central hub for various operations - it became a workspace for agents, a CTI platform, a platform to send service emails and much more. Over time, Salesforce evolved beyond just a customer relationship management tool for Vandebron. It became a full-fledged platform that managed customer-related processes, such as the Signup process, Renewal process, Meter Reading process, etc. To support this transition, Vandebron developed a custom mechanism known as FlowRunner, which was designed to automate and execute these processes within Salesforce. Initially, FlowRunner seemed like the perfect solution. It was tailor-made to handle the increasingly complex workflows that Vandebron needed to manage. While it successfully managed to support Vandebron’s operations for several years, this system was not without its flaws. These issues, which will be discussed in detail later, eventually led to the need for a more robust and scalable solution. But for a time, FlowRunner did its job, enabling Vandebron to leverage Salesforce far beyond its original purpose.
Broadly, the problems can be divided into two categories: technical and organizational.
Technical Problems:
Organizational Problems:
At the beginning of 2022, Europe was hit by an unprecedented energy crisis. Gas and electricity prices skyrocketed, fluctuating unpredictably, and placing immense pressure on energy providers like Vandebron to adapt swiftly. In response, Vandebron introduced a solution designed to navigate this volatile market: the Flexible Variable Tariffs proposition. From a technical standpoint, implementing this new offering required the execution of a relatively complex process - Flow_VariableTariff for approximately 50% of our customer base. However, it soon became clear that the FlowRunner mechanism and Salesforce in general were not sufficient to handle the demands of this new process. The total execution time for Flow_VariableTariff was projected to be enormous, spanning over 20 days, which was far too long for a business that needed to respond rapidly to market changes. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, we immediately sought ways to optimize the process. While we succeeded in significantly simplifying Flow_VariableTariff, these improvements alone were insufficient to meet our needs. It was at this critical juncture that we realized Salesforce and the FlowRunner were no longer adequate for Vandebron’s evolving requirements. The limitations of these tools became glaringly apparent, signaling the need for a more powerful and flexible solution to support our operations in the face of such a dynamic and challenging environment.
Choosing the right process orchestration tool is a critical decision, especially for a company like Vandebron, where efficient workflow management is essential for operational success. To ensure we made the best choice, we began by establishing a set of criteria that the new tool needed to meet. These criteria were designed to address our current challenges and future-proof our operations. Here are some of the most crucial criteria:
Our market analysis of process orchestration tools led us to evaluate five potential solutions:
Each vendor provided us with a demo and/or a trial version of their product. During this evaluation process, we rigorously tested each tool against our criteria. Although all five options met our hard requirements, it quickly became evident that Camunda is the true leader in the market.
Several factors contributed to our decision to choose Camunda:
In the end, Camunda stood out as the optimal choice for Vandebron’s process orchestration needs, offering the perfect balance of functionality, usability, and support.
Before we could begin migrating our processes from Salesforce to Camunda, it was essential to establish a robust infrastructure that would allow Camunda to seamlessly integrate with the rest of Vandebron’s ecosystem, particularly Salesforce. Since Salesforce would continue to serve as the primary workspace for our agents, we needed to ensure smooth communication and data flow between the two platforms. To achieve this, we developed several key infrastructural applications:
As of September 2024, we have successfully implemented the basic infrastructure needed for Camunda integration, and three customer-related processes have been migrated from Salesforce to Camunda, with several more in progress. It's important to highlight that the migration process involved a comprehensive analysis of the existing process, including the removal of legacy components, identification of common errors, and targeted optimization efforts. As a result, we achieved a substantial reduction in errors. Specifically, the Flow_Renewal process, which previously had a 2% failure rate, now experiences only a 0.62% dropout rate post-migration, reflecting a 69% decrease in errors.
By the end of the year, we aim to migrate up to 10 processes to Camunda, further reducing our reliance on Salesforce for process orchestration. In parallel, we plan to enhance our infrastructure applications—CamundaGateway, CamundaSync, CamundaJobWorker, and the BPM frontend app - to improve their performance, scalability, and ease of use. These enhancements will ensure that our systems remain robust and efficient as we expand our use of Camunda across more of Vandebron's operations. Moving forward, We will continue to leverage Camunda's capabilities to automate and optimize more processes, ultimately driving greater efficiencies and innovations across Vandebron.