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The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) was facing challenges with their proprietary solution for the execution of business processes. Communication between the business side and IT was very difficult. The complexity and cost of process implementation was very high. The operation of the processes and the development of changes and improvements were difficult and depended on the expertise of specific persons. They have complex business processes that change frequently and generally very complex security requirements. Their compliance was difficult to monitor. In order to achieve a more business-driven development, they opted for the use of Business Process Management (BPM).

LVM Insurance, one of the leading insurance groups in Germany, was facing challenges in managing its internal administrative processes and inventory management. The company had two different systems for order and processing, which were operated in parallel with no integration interface except for the user. The data was transferred manually using copy/paste, and the process was not controlled but based on a central document accessible to all employees involved. The actual process was in the employees' minds, and everyone knew when it was their turn and what they had to do. In the 'inventory management life' project, parts of the existing life-contract system were replaced by a new development. Asynchronous single processing was used, which had already been proven successful in other sectors. However, a lightweight solution was needed to reduce complexity for both developers and operations.

freenet.de, a subsidiary of freenet Group, aimed to efficiently support key sales processes with software solutions. These processes were in the areas of contracting, upgrading, and termination of services of the product lines freenetMail, single.de, and portal (freenet.de). While these processes were largely automated, the solution for process support had to be reevaluated due to the outsourcing of billings for the offered services to a specialized service provider. The existing solution, which had been developed individually for a decade, was efficient and offered many features. However, the expenses for maintenance and modification of the solution were high, necessitating a more cost-saving model. In this context, OPITZ CONSULTING was commissioned to select an appropriate architecture and support with its implementation.

Zymergen, a molecular technology company, was facing challenges in expediting the process of onboarding new projects while maintaining process efficiency and customizability. With an increase in clients, the company needed to reduce the time required to onboard new projects while still guaranteeing efficient and customizable processes. This required a solution that could integrate with its automation and digital systems while providing a flexible interface for scientists and other non-programmers to create, update, and execute these complex workflows.

In 2010, Generali Infrastructure Services introduced a monolithic cloud solution to provide IT services such as servers or platforms on demand. However, integration with the existing IT service management system and non-automated services was difficult and required considerable adjustments to the cloud solution. Complex processes could only be mapped rudimentarily in a proprietary process control system. The organizational and technical integration was very difficult in terms of operation and maintenance. For this reason, in late 2013 they decided to take an integrated approach to providing an integration platform with a focus on automation by means of business process management and a service-oriented architecture in the infrastructure services area.

T-Mobile Austria operates in a highly competitive telecommunications market, serving around 7.5 million customers. The company needs to regularly deliver new products and services to meet high consumer expectations. Business teams at T-Mobile Austria design new products, services, and promotions, and it's up to IT teams to implement these ideas as quickly as possible. Slow delivery risks products becoming irrelevant in a fast-moving space. Implementing new products involves a significant amount of complexity for the more than 100 developers who are responsible for implementation. T-Mobile Austria needs to integrate with more than 40 different back-end systems to ensure that customers have a seamless experience when using new products, and the company adheres to strict service level agreements to deliver best-in-class quality.

Visana, a Swiss health and accident insurer, processes around 32,000 documents daily and pays out up to CHF 12 million in treatment costs. The company prides itself on its customer service, promising to deliver policies within 20 minutes and agreed benefits within an average of eight working days. However, in 2015, Visana decided to further develop its technical infrastructure to accelerate workflows and improve the customer experience on its digital channels. The company needed a solution that could efficiently manage and optimize its workflow processes, identify resource bottlenecks, and aid in capacity planning.

Deutsche Telekom IT, the internal IT service provider of Deutsche Telekom AG, was facing several issues with its monolithic Oracle BPEL engine that was used to build and run BPM workflows and process automation. The monolithic system resulted in a lengthy time-to-market, lasting more than 12 months. Vendor lock-in limited the implementation of new features and it took five days to set up or make changes to environments. Releases took, on average, 1000 people-days or roughly three months to realize, and regression testing took around two days to process all test cases. In 2017, Deutsche Telekom IT adopted a ‘partially agile’ development approach, working in three-month sprints. However, all fixes had to be delivered together with larger change requests, which took considerable people-hours to accomplish. In addition, they were still struggling with the monolithic BPEL system, which didn’t allow for true agility.

Atlassian, a global software company with over 4,000 employees, was seeking to support its enterprise-wide business process automation initiatives. These initiatives spanned various departments including finance, commerce, marketing, and customer support. One of the initial projects involved integrating a new SaaS-based accounting platform to centralize finance workflows and revenue recognition processes. Several other projects were also in the pipeline, including process automation for Salesforce lead management and routing customer support cases.

Vodafone Germany faced several issues with its OTELO and branded reseller IT system. The system ran a vast number of different services, supporting an array of customer-facing channels – from campaigns and product offers to POS. However, it was impossible to separate the channels and, without an effective API layer in the infrastructure, Vodafone couldn’t establish an important online partner channel that was urgently required within its branded reseller and second brand segments. This legacy services technology wasn’t just ineffective to use and difficult to maintain, it created high maintenance and operating costs, a slow time-to-market for new products and an inconsistent customer experience. Vodafone needed to develop a truly agile, transparent and scalable approach. But with processes distributed everywhere imaginable within its system landscape, Vodafone needed to discover where its processes were and how they were performing, before it could migrate to a modern cloud-based infrastructure.

Babylon Health, one of the largest National Health Service (NHS) practices in the UK, was confronted with a significant management challenge. Each consultation with a patient triggers a complex, personalised workflow combining human and automated tasks to ensure each patient receives the right treatment and doesn’t require any further support. With personalised workflows for every single consultation, managing these processes was a significant challenge. Additionally, the safety of patients is a consistent consideration throughout – losing track of a patient during a process can have a catastrophic effect on their personal health and cannot occur under any circumstances.

Sony DADC New Media Solutions was using a proprietary workflow engine based on Oracle PL / SQL, which was originally designed for the physical production of disks. The company wanted to provide business analysts and operations with a better insight into the implemented processes and their current execution, while also increasing the flexibility to address customer demands. They were considering developing a new workflow engine, but then weighed up a ‘make or buy’ decision. The company was expecting a very high number of simultaneously running processes or events to be processed, which is why they were eager to understand the Camunda Process Engine in detail.

Helsana, Switzerland’s largest healthcare insurer, was struggling with legacy, paper-based processes that were hindering its operations. The company had no easy way for customers to buy and approve products online, a feature that has become commonplace in the insurance industry. There was resistance to making the necessary process changes due to past negative experiences with monolithic, centralized process engines. These past process automation projects were associated with long hours of additional work, brittle code, and expensive consultancy fees. The challenge was to change the mindset about modern, lightweight, and flexible process automation and to demonstrate how it could benefit the business as a whole.

Global telecommunication companies are facing enormous pressure from new market entrants with cutting-edge business models, ever-changing government regulations, and a hypercompetitive landscape. These factors are forcing market leaders to rethink their operating models and discover ways to cut time and friction from their processes. Legacy tech and long-proven ways of doing business quickly become the biggest barriers preventing monetization. Some telcos bear a too-costly burden of keeping outmoded systems online to maintain revenues from existing business units, which makes it harder to innovate and transform. One critical area where Amdocs is helping telcos companies transform the customer experience is order fulfillment. Engaging customers at the moment of need with precisely the right experience or offer can have a dramatic impact on sales. However, too often legacy services are supported by a large patchwork of legacy systems and loaded with manual and paper-intensive tasks.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) was facing a growing backlog of claims due to manual processing, specialized domain expertise requirements for claims processors, and competing priorities for key knowledge resources. Factors such as new legislation and the COVID-19 pandemic increased the urgency for a solution that could be delivered quickly. The VA needed a new, highly modern solution to shorten benefits claims processing and clear the claim backlog. The solution needed to integrate machine learning and business process automation to expedite pension, Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC), and burial claims processing.

Münchener Hypothekenbank eG, an independent real estate bank, was looking for innovative ways to stay competitive and decided to coordinate and automate internal processes within its private-client business. However, its existing process optimization system had its limits. The three processes - directing incoming mail, internal releasing of outgoing mail, and working together between departments on loan applications, across different systems - relied on the same process engine, making it impossible to carry out maintenance on one process independently of the others. Furthermore, the processes lacked the functions and interfaces to be freely configurable, resulting in increased complexity and a higher error rate.

R+V Versicherung AG, one of the largest insurance companies in Germany, was facing challenges with its old, monolithic software solution for business process management (BPM). The inflexible system required months of preparation for a release change, involving many manual tests and complete environment rebuilds. This process often resulted in system failures, negatively impacting the customer experience. Furthermore, updates were only carried out every few years, with smaller updates several times a year, limiting the company's agility and ability to respond to new requirements quickly.

The logistics industry is characterized by complex rules and regulations, governing imports and exports across international borders, leading companies to build deep business process knowledge over many years. Automating these deeply customized processes with off-the-shelf software leads to poor solutions and user dissatisfaction. But individual software solutions developed specifically for companies are unreasonably expensive. Like every business, the production and logistics industries are facing intense pressure to modernize. Constant optimization of processes is necessary to maintain and differentiate a company in the face of ever-tougher competition.

The hospitality industry was facing a crisis due to the global pandemic. The business model was workforce-heavy and expensive, and the industry was dealing with technology limitations that prevented them from offering a seamless data-driven digital guest experience or an intuitive employee solution. SV Group, a leading hospitality company operating in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, wanted to create a disruptive, end-to-end digital guest journey and an all-encompassing employee solution. They wanted to make it seamless for guests to book, check-in, enjoy their stay, and check out, thereby creating a superior customer experience. At the same time, they wanted to provide their employees with a one-stop solution that allowed them to service their guests in a proactive way. The biggest challenge of this ambitious project was orchestrating various cloud microservices to ensure critical processes run without issue to deliver a consistently exceptional guest experience.

SV Informatik, a provider of custom IT solutions for insurance companies, was in search of a new modeling tool for business processes. They needed a solution that would allow for process documentation, partial automation, and closer cooperation between the specialist area and IT. The company also faced challenges in handling mass loss events, such as storms, which could result in thousands of damage reports within a few days. These reports had to be manually transferred to the relevant insurance system, a process that was time-consuming and inefficient.

Automating land titling and taxation requires developing workflows that often incorporate more than a century’s worth of historical land and title data, mortgage information, cadastral maps, and more. In some cases, new titles may bring previously unregistered land onto tax rolls for the first time, creating new records adding tax revenue for a municipality. Land titling offices also have to keep up with an ever-changing regulatory environment and tax structure. Automated workflows for land titling and deed registration aren’t static, and land administrators need flexibility to customize titling and deed processes regularly and visibility to see that land transfers are processed and recorded efficiently.

The insurance and financial services firm was struggling with a manual quote-to-proposal process that was inefficient and negatively impacting revenue. The process involved employees manually reviewing each quote, extracting more than 200 fields of data to create a spreadsheet, and developing a consolidated report presented to the client. Once a plan was selected, the company would have to prepare a customer onboarding booklet with all coverage details. The entire process was tedious, time-consuming, and prone to error. The cost of business with small clients was incredibly high due to the manual nature of the process.

The company’s vendor invoice intake process was too time-consuming, repetitive, prone to error and delays. One of the client’s teams handles vendor invoicing for multiple business units, processing invoices from more than 30 different systems. With more than a thousand invoices coming in per month, it was time-consuming to collect and process data sent from numerous systems and in a variety of formats. Employees had to manually extract data from every document. Analyzing data, identifying missing information, and reuploading invoices was time-consuming and repetitive. The required bandwidth to pull invoices from various systems would stretch when the volume of invoices would increase, putting more stress and pressure on each team member. A high volume of invoices meant the team was more prone to errors, which slowed processing times and created billing delays.

Dentsu Aegis Network, a media and digital marketing communications company, was facing challenges with its mid-office media activation processes. These processes were repetitive, time-consuming, and prone to human error. Each customer had different needs, requiring Dentsu to adapt to each one. The process required extensive back-and-forth between multiple stakeholders and the speed was impacted by how quickly team members could respond to customers. An entire team was needed to absorb the pre-reconciliation actualization work to confirm media spend for large accounts.

Bosch, a global manufacturing company, was in need of a strong, collaborative automation technology partner to accelerate its digital transformation. The company was looking for a solution that could help them evaluate their operations, design and implement automated processes, and uncover ways to scale their efforts. The challenge was to find a technology partner that could meet Bosch's rigorous cloud security needs, critical for a company of its size and global footprint. Additionally, the company was also using RPA tools, so the new technology partner needed to have tight integrations to unlock even more value from across Bosch’s technology stack.

The transportation and logistics company was facing internal and external pressures to increase their operational efficiency. Much of the operational work was manual and tactical, often leading to high turnover rates due to lack of employee motivation and engagement. At the same time, there was pressure to do more with less, as consumer expectations were high, yet most were unwilling to pay more for the convenience of faster shipping. The company needed to align repetitive tasks with automation and enable employees to focus on the engaging, human-centric functions that drive value to the employee, the company, and customers.

The company needed to help its customers disclose all leases on the balance sheet due to changes in both international and US regulations. The company’s customers, mostly large enterprises, have thousands of lease agreements, which must be scoured for relevant information. The task was difficult to automate because lease agreements are not standardized and because the same type of information can be expressed using many different terms, causing poor results from keyword-based systems.

The support cases handled by the company’s support engineers were difficult and time-consuming to resolve because they referred to complicated technical issues in a complex networking environment. The fact that customers often used different terminology than what is used in the company internal documentation made the task even more difficult. Efficient handling of support cases was predicated on finding a solution from past cases instead of troubleshooting the issue from scratch. Attempts to reduce the time to find meaningful results with other search-based solutions failed, as they were not able to quickly and consistently identify similar support cases and did not improve the support team’s productivity.

The Fortune 500 insurance company was struggling with the manual extraction of key information from prior insurance plans issued by the competition. The process was tedious, error-prone, and expensive due to labor costs. The company had to review tens of thousands of policies per year, each with their own jargon and format. The complexity of the plans, with multiple entries per row and multiple employee classes of coverage, made the task even more challenging. Manual work often overlooked important provisions, leading to inaccurate quote calculations and profit losses for the company. Conventional tools failed to extract accurate information, forcing the company to rely on expensive manual labor.

The biopharmaceutical company was facing a challenge in tracking off-label usage of their medications. Off-label usage refers to the prescribing of medications in a manner not specified by the FDA and accounts for 10 to 20 percent of all prescriptions written. However, its exact extent is difficult to measure because pharmaceutical companies have no direct feedback mechanism to track what medical conditions their products are prescribed for. The company had no means to monitor how their medications are used as patient records are subject to privacy restrictions and do not allow the company to reconstruct which medication was prescribed for which condition. The company decided to use social media, particularly Reddit, as a source of knowledge about medication usage.