What needs improvement with Camunda BPM?

Just today I encountered a problem with the current version, and that is the functionality of the BPM standard, which is not yet implemented in Camunda. An example would be a new marker for tasks. Maybe the developers of Camunda can, as soon as possible, provide all possible functionalities of BPM standard in its process engine. Some are not yet supported and they can really cause serious problems for implementers. In the next release I would like to have more documentation on how it can interact with other organization systems, as well as other documentation about API. I would also like more support about features. It would be great for someone like me with a little programming and developing background, to see an easier platform for data modeling. A place where you can create your own data model, your own entities, your own entity relationship, and be able to find a form based on that data model. That would be much more straight forward for someone like me, as a teacher. But it's not provided here right now. I would also like an easy to use form builder.

In the future, I would definitely like to see the process administration (migration, audit, tracking) and process evaluation (optimize) features added to the community edition. Right now, thanks to the pluggable architecture, we have built features that partially substitute the enterprise edition features.

I don't see many issues with this product. The migration strategy needs to be improved. Most of the financial institutions in North America are looking towards open source BPM to replace their existing existing BPM platform.Camunda has already started working on a plugin to mgirate any kind of BPM workflows to Camunda BPM seamlessly. They have just released a beta plugin to migrate Legacy BPM processes to Camunda BPM. If they make it as a full-featured version, that would be a lot of help with migration projects.

Documentation can be improved. Right now, the documentation isn't properly organized. We have a lot of documentation. We follow the instructions. We follow some blogs and videos on YouTube. But it doesn't feel like we have all the information we need to implement Camunda BPM.

As I mencioned, we've just finished a proof of concept, so our experience with the tool is still very recent. In general, it mets ours expectations. Something that could be improoved is the capabilitie of integranting different modeling tools, in order to facilitate both the import and export of models.

I would like to see more examples of using .NET and Camunda. I'm from the .NET world and I would like to use it, rather than Java. For Java, Camunda is great. For .NET I have opinion that need more real life examples. For example I woudl like to see example of .NET Blazor UI with Camunda. Also, I would like to see more examples of how to work with a team of users.

Process interfaces between diagrams could be improved. I'd like to see process interfaces and structure in order to make process architecture. Not only to lift diagrams, but to make new diagrams and new data. You can make new diagram and new data but if the client wants to open a current account, then it must be a process interface. It would also be helpful if they would publish processes in a format that can be easily viewable and understandable. The main area would be in publishing because we want to have all the processes published on our intranet.

The upfront enterprise-level support could have been better. They need improvement. The initial set up could be simplified, it's complex. I would like to see better sales support, upfront implementation, and more a more wizard-like walkthrough with the next release.

The only drawback is the time that it takes to have a complete set of workflows implemented on the Camunda platform. This is from drawing the modeling and the workflow up to the production release. The support definitely has to be improved. Second, it needs to be more intuitive. As it is now, to develop an automated process in Camunda, you would need to involve a front end developer, backend developer, and sometimes, someone who has experience with modeling. Where in Appian and Pega, you would be able to simply reduce these overheads by creating the process, the flow, and converting it within certain boundaries into the automated process. The visualization part can definitely be improved. You can see the process moving live, but if you have a complex design where you would like to show the process in a different shape, that takes a lot of customization and a lot of coding effort to put this in place. The visualization needs not a little or a medium amount of work, but rather, it requires a lot of improvement. At the end of the day, we have the process, we have the workflow, we have the event, we have everything. However, what the people see at the end of the day is what they believe. So sometimes we know that we do have a lot of data and a lot of information, but we fail to represent this information in a way that meets or addresses the business requirements. Better visualization capabilities would help in this regard.

From my point of view, there is a lot that has room for improvement. But one option that they should focus on most is improving the basic parts of the BPM tools. One example is that they should offer some additional options in terms of employing connectors. We implemented most of our solutions in Java through delegation. We could have done a better job of that with connectors. So connectors are one of the cases where they might improve. Another point that I am thinking of that I can not do by myself is to improve the forms. Right now the forms are fairly simple. It would be nice to implement some kind of wizard, or advanced form, and be able to fill in data dynamically. A possible add-on is to have a mobile app. Specifically, it would be a tool used to prepare forms dynamically and to preview business projects. If you know what you need to do, you can actually do a lot with a product like that. From a security point of view, I think that some features can be added or enhanced. I see a lot of opportunities for interesting stuff that can be implemented like installation identity or places where token authorization can be used. More security measures can be added in order to offer options to protect the front line. One final feature that would be nice is the opportunity to operate an active database. I do not think that will happen soon. It is okay because we have very powerful database options right now.

The support definitely can be improved. Apart from that, the language should be extendable to other platforms. If I want to write, I'll run a different platform, like Python code on top of it, or COBOL code on top of it, and it should support those languages. It should also have some kind of a custom-engineering extension that will add on to it.

I think there is room for improvement along with the process. Camunda doesn't have a strong forms designer. While that is an advantage in one scenario in that we were able to bring a third party UI, it was lacking in forms visualization and it would be good to have some kind of a strong forms designer that allows development along with the process. More often, we are seeing BPM used in conjunction with other automation technologies like RPA and AI. If Camunda were to be placed as a central BPM, it would need a better integration mechanism.

Hi dear knauf
its pleasure to see you in a good position, you were always in the top of specialist.
your advise and solutions make your customer to takeoff their business.

Especially when you use the open-source version, there are issues with performance. The external programs that communicate with Camunda are kind of late 20th century in terms of style and need updating.

The simulation feature of this solution needs improvement. As an example, if I wanted to highlight an event then when I press on it, I would like all of the impacted processes to highlight. That way, you can see the impact of an event on different processes. If there were some industry templates it would have helped significantly, because it is similar to a process map for a domain. That is what we are currently creating, a domain-relevant process map. When it comes to insurance, just to give you an example, there is marketing, then underwriting, policies for contracts, policies for prevention, collections, there are claims, and business flows that we had to create from scratch. If we could have started through a template, it would have helped us kick start the initiative.

I would like to have a feature for audit logging and audit log management, and some history of use for the audit logs. It's not anything I need, but our clients often require these features and then we have to do it ourselves. I would also like additional models for location.

I would like to see the forms engine available in the open-source version of this solution.

The user interface needs improvement. It should be more tailored to the end-user and offer a better user experience design over the user interface itself. The solution could also use more and better frameworks in terms of embedding them in the engine. Right now the only embedded framework that's supported is Java. It's not a problem because you can also have remote workers that do part of the process through their remote RESTful API which they have clients for, but you cannot embed .NET. You cannot embed that for execution within the engine through delegates, so I would definitely say that would be a plus if they would expand that. Certainly in terms of performance.

In terms of areas for improvement, they can come up with something called a generic workflow application. The engine is really good, but I believe that if they can come up with some sort of application while still keeping the core of Camunda, that would be really great. An application which could cater to a generic workflow, the same application can cater to any domain people can make use of it. In regards to advice, I would say the scalability features, which are available in the paid version, should also be available to the community. But otherwise, if I'm talking about the quality or the scalability issue, it's still good.

We were discussing Alfresco. They were saying that their product is much better than Camunda BPM. We signed the governance policy for "Cloud First". When you search for Camunda BPM resources or books on how to utilize Camunda BPM, it is lacking. When it comes to Alfresco, there are thousands of resources that can help you to utilize within AWS and its Group Services. I would like to see the usage of Camunda BPM on Amazon Web Services be improved. For Camunda BPM, the sense of community is lacking. The company itself is based in Germany. Alfresco is a very small company with an open source community. It is really good and it works perfectly. It was easy for us to adopt it. We are proposing that Camunda BPM can be offered as a web service. What could be improved is better support for AWS and training provided with the platform to make it easier to use.

The GUI needs to be improved, with more configuration options. The backend needs to be more configurable, as well. The security needs to be improved. Generally speaking, other tools are more mature.

If Camunda could develop something that creates user forms that would be a great feature to have. They also need to improve the UI.