Camunda > Case Studies > Camunda BPM at the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property

Camunda BPM at the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property

Customer Company Size

Mid-size Company

Region

Europe

Country

Switzerland

Product

Camunda BPM platform

Tech Stack

Java EE
BPMN 2.0

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Digital Expertise

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Process Control & Optimization

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) is based in Bern, Switzerland. It is the address for intellectual property (trademarks, patents and designs) in Switzerland and partly also for the corresponding international applications. It examines national applications, grants intellectual property rights and administers them. Since 2014, the IPI has used the Camunda BPM platform to run their core processes in the area of intellectual property rights management.

The Challenge

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).

The Solution

The IPI chose Camunda BPM for its business process management needs. Camunda is the only manufacturer that truly and consistently supports BPMN 2.0 and does not propagate the “Zero Code BPM” myth. Camunda did not force the IPI to change its IT environment or technology stack, but offered a fully integrated BPM engine with optional tools. This allowed the IPI to benefit from BPM without having to adjust to specific products. They could freely decide which products and technologies they wanted to use for UI, monitoring, reporting, search etc. Additionally it offered integration with Java EE, which meant they were able to fully benefit from Java EE.

Operational Impact

Transparency in the development and operation: The IPI is now actually able to live business-driven process implementation. The speed of implementation is less important than the much higher quality of the result, so that fewer changes are necessary. If changes occur, these are of a higher quality and consider all aspects and requirements in a holistic manner.
Thanks to the architecture of Camunda BPM the IPI could abstain from using integration middleware such as an enterprise service bus (ESB). Due to Camunda BPM’s concepts for asynchronous processing, an additional ESB is simply not necessary.
The operation has become much more effective due to Camunda Cockpit. The complete monitoring of the involved IT systems takes place entirely via the monitoring of business processes in Camunda Cockpit.

Quantitative Benefit