For companies that want to excel, process automation is now a necessity rather than an option. This applies to the energy sector as well. With our tech partner Camunda, we built a powerful platform at Vandebron to orchestrate this green energy provider's business processes in the best way possible. The objective: to accelerate the speed of the transition to sustainable energy.
About Vandebron
Vandebron is an innovative energy supplier that actively promotes a sustainable future. In pursuit of this policy, the company connects its Dutch consumers directly with local producers of renewable energy. This not only provides transparency, the electricity supplied is also guaranteed to be fully green. Vandebron uses smart energy applications and a focus on customer impact to help reduce carbon emissions and make the energy market more sustainable and fairer.
However, this innovative model was associated with several challenges, specifically in the areas of onboarding and data management. The company's dependency on a legacy system that required significant customisation by developers hampered its ability to scale up and adapt.
Home-grown BPM solution was not future-proof
The existing Business Process Management solution for automating customer processes, built in Salesforce, had proved not to be future-proof. The pioneer in sustainable energy found itself struggling with the limitations of an outdated system for automating customer processes. Not only was the system difficult to maintain, it also stood in the way of the company's growth and impaired flexibility.
Operating at the limits of the system, Vandebron was particularly hampered by the asynchronous processing speeds of various tasks. In addition, IT and business teams were experiencing difficulty in creating and managing their parts of the overall solution, which slowed the pace of innovation.
Finding Salesforce developers with enough experience to effectively tackle the ongoing development tasks was also challenging. To resolve these issues, Camunda was chosen as the solution for process orchestration, paving the way for sustainable growth and faster fulfilment of Vandebron's sustainability mission.
Vandebron needed a flexible and scalable solution for process automation, without the limitations of the old system. That's why we chose Camunda as the process orchestration platform.
Embracing process orchestration with Camunda
Vandebron's need for a flexible and scalable solution led to the decision to replace its custom-built Salesforce workflow solution with Camunda. This allowed us to set up flexible, scalable and efficient process automation for the energy supplier, without the limitations and bottlenecks of the old system.
The implementation of Camunda resulted in several significant improvements at Vandebron almost immediately:
Decentralised process ownership
With the introduction of Camunda, Vandebron has moved from a ‘black box’ solution to a comprehensive toolbox for process automation. One impact of this shift is that different teams have now taken ownership of their processes, accelerating innovation and allowing improvements to be implemented in parallel. The creation of a Center of Excellence (CoE) for process management also supported this collaborative approach.
Simplified onboarding and maintenance
Camunda's user-friendly interface and extensive Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) capabilities have shortened the time new team members need before they can start making a meaningful contribution. This simplification was crucial in addressing the steep learning curve the previous system suffered from.
Better collaboration and greater transparency
Camunda has facilitated better collaboration between developers and stakeholders. By having both groups collaborate in process modelling, Camunda ensures that the business requirements are accurately defined and implemented. This collaborative approach has resulted in ‘living documents’ that can be continually updated and refined in line with process orchestration best practices.
Improved performance and scalability
Thanks to Camunda's distributed architecture, Vandebron is no longer held back by the limitations of the previous solution. The ability to handle large-scale processes more efficiently is a significant improvement that allows Vandebron to better manage the growing transaction volume without processing delays.
By having developers and stakeholders collaborate in process modelling, Camunda ensures that the business requirements are accurately defined and implemented.
Promising initial results
During the transition to Camunda, the development teams that were used to the old system experienced some initial trepidation. However, thanks to structured training, best practices and support from both Camunda and us, Vandebron was effortlessly able to negotiate this potential hurdle.
Incentro helped Vandebron with the architecture of Camunda and the work needed to set up the Center of Excellence. From day one, the objective was to ensure that Vandebron could independently design, automate and optimise processes in Camunda, in line with the ‘demonstrate, participate, execute’ principle.
Vandebron's positive experiences with Camunda show how effective process orchestration can help solve automation problems. The initial results are extremely promising. With several processes already live and more in the pipeline, Vandebron is well on its way to migrating all its processes to Camunda.
By further refining process integration, Vandebron can focus fully on providing a balanced electricity grid, having satisfied customers and accelerating the energy transition.
Our partner Camunda has also published a case study on Vandebron (English only).
