The Total Economic Impact™ Of Camunda For Enterprises

Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Camunda

A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study Commissioned By Camunda, February 2024

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Study Data

Company name

Revenue

Customers

Employees

Total business processes

Advanced inputs

Operating margin

Business Processes

Average instances per year for most common processes

Percentage of processes that are external/customer-facing

Percentage of processes orchestrated with Camunda

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Customer Satisfaction

Customer retention rate

Operations Efficiencies

Average manual completion time for longest processes (hours)

Development Efficiencies

Changes to processes per year

Development timeline to change processes (weeks)

Process Quality

Process error rate

Average cost per error

Camunda Platform Administration

On-premises Camunda deployment

Your Organization

Company name

Revenue

Customers

Employees

Total business processes

Advanced inputs

Operating margin

Business Processes

Average instances per year for most common processes

Percentage of processes that are external/customer-facing

Percentage of processes orchestrated with Camunda

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Customer Satisfaction

Customer retention rate

Operations Efficiencies

Average manual completion time for longest processes (hours)

Development Efficiencies

Changes to processes per year

Development timeline to change processes (weeks)

Process Quality

Process error rate

Average cost per error

Camunda Platform Administration

On-premises Camunda deployment

Strategic, scaled investments in process automation with Camunda can: 1) improve customer experiences, 2) increase employee productivity, 3) enhance business agility, and 4) reduce business risks. Leaders who center process orchestration within their businesses do more than increase efficiencies, they transform their organizations.

Camunda is a digital process automation (DPA) platform that helps organizations automate processes end to end. Its software coordinates automation endpoints which can be humans, robotic process automation (RPA) bots, or application programming interfaces (APIs) to internal and external systems. Camunda uses open standards such as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and Decision Model and Notation (DMN), and Camunda’s visual modeling and low-code solutions enable stakeholders other than professional developers (e.g., nonprofessional or citizen developers) to participate in process development and maintenance.

Camunda commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Camunda strategically and at scale.¹ The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Camunda on their organizations.

Return on investment (ROI)

408%408%

Net present value (NPV)

$112.1M$112.1M

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed five representatives of four organizations with experience using Camunda. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that generates $25 billion in revenue and has 55 million customers and 60,000 employees.

generates $0 in revenue and has 0 customers and 0 employees. Custom results are based on these inputs and the TEI case study.

Before using Camunda, the interviewees’ organizations had limited solutions for process automation, and those solutions often used proprietary standards rather than open standards. The interviewees found that their organizations’ prior solutions could not support the scale and complexity of the processes they wanted to orchestrate, and they said that process development using the prior solutions was too slow to meet business needs.

The interviewees’ organizations invested in Camunda strategically: Instead of simply automating processes one by one, they created teams responsible for enabling decentralized process development and fostered cultures that empowered employees to leverage Camunda for all kinds of process orchestration.

Strategic investment in Camunda yielded several benefits. First, by automating processes their customers interact with regularly, the interviewees’ organizations provided better, faster customer service and improved their customers’ experiences. Second, by automating back-office processes across multiple departments and business units, the organizations increased their overall operational efficiency. Third, the organizations developed and changed processes faster with Camunda, thereby reducing development timelines and increasing business agility. And, finally, widespread process automation reduced the risk of errors and improved regulatory compliance for organizations with complex, global operations.

Key Findings

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

Increased customer satisfaction yielding $57.8 million in profits. Processes orchestrated with Camunda provide the composite organization with better customer service and have higher customer retention. As the organization orchestrates more processes with Camunda (initially orchestrating only 5% of its business processes with Camunda and then increasing this to 28% of all processes in Year 3), aggregate customer retention increases by 2%. This increase is small, but it translates into 1.27 million happier customers for the composite.

For , increased customer satisfaction might yield in profits. An increase in customer retention might translate into happier customers.

Improvements in operations efficiency worth $66.6 million. Process automation saves employees time, and as the composite organization orchestrates and improves more processes with Camunda, its employees save even more time. Although each employee saves only a few hours, the total time savings across the composite organization over three years equates to 5,525 full-time or equivalent (FTE) resources.

For , improvements in operations efficiency might be worth , and the total time savings over three years might equate to 0 FTEs.

20,000+ hours

Development time saved

Process development efficiencies worth $615,000. The composite’s business processes regularly change as its business requirements change. Processes orchestrated with Camunda take the composite organization about half as much time to change as processes implemented with other solutions. Thus, as the composite organization orchestrates more processes with Camunda, development team members increasingly save time responding to business needs and development costs fall over time as business analysts increasingly participate in process development. In total, the composite organization saves over 20,000 hours of development, but this benefit is relatively small because the business impacts of process agility are not quantified in this study.

For , process development efficiencies might be worth , and in total, might save 0 hours of development.

Improvements in process quality that save $15 million. Because the composite organization is a global company in a highly regulated industry, process errors require manual work to fix and, in the worst case, can result in fines. Process automation reduces the likelihood of errors, so the composite organization avoids costs it would have otherwise incurred.

For , improvements in process quality might save .

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

Improved collaboration between IT and business stakeholders. Open standards such as BPMN improve communication between developers and business stakeholders, and Camunda’s visual tools enable business stakeholders to contribute to process development and thereby reduce development costs.

Improved visibility into processes. By orchestrating its most complex processes with Camunda, the composite organization can gather analytics about those processes and gain insights into them, which enables it to improve them over time.

Costs. Three-year, risk-adjusted PV costs for the composite organization include:

Camunda licensing costs of $3 million over three years. Camunda licensing costs are based on usage. Initially, the composite organization uses Camunda to orchestrate only 25 business processes. However, by Year 3, the composite organization uses Camunda to orchestrate 140 business processes with 46 million process instances.

For , Camunda licensing costs might be over three years.

Process development costs of $23 million. Developers and business analysts distributed across multiple departments and business units contribute to process automation work. The composite organization’s development effort per process decreases over time as it matures its Camunda practice (e.g., builds reusable components, etc.). In Year 1, the composite organization develops and maintains 45 orchestrated processes with 34 FTEs. By Year 3, the composite organization has 140 orchestrated processes, and process development efforts grow to include 71 FTEs.

For , process development costs might be over three years. By Year 3, might have 0 orchestrated processes, and process development efforts might involve 0 FTEs.

Training costs of $92,000 for new Camunda users. The composite organization’s developers and business analysts who build processes with Camunda become proficient in four weeks or less. Because Camunda uses open standards, new users can leverage prior experience (e.g., with first-class programming languages, BPMN, and DMN). New users also benefit from resources such as Camunda Academy. As the composite organization’s Camunda practice matures, new users increasingly learn both from internal resources as well as from their colleagues.

For , training costs for new Camunda users might be over three years.

Platform administration costs of $1.1 million. The composite organization creates a central team of nine business analysts and developers who spend part of their time supporting and enabling Camunda usage throughout the organization, but they spend most of their time on tasks unrelated to Camunda. Because the composite organization uses Camunda on-premises rather than in the cloud, some administration costs grow as its Camunda usage increases.

For , platform administration costs might be over three years.

Employee and end-user retraining costs of $486,000. Whenever the composite organization automates a new process with Camunda, it must train the employees who perform that process on any new procedures. As the composite organization orchestrates more processes with Camunda, these change management costs grow. To be conservative, Forrester assumes that 2,208 total employees each need 5 hours of retraining.

For , employee and end-user retraining costs might be over three years.

The representative interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $139.5 million over three years versus costs of $27.5 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $112.1 million and an ROI of 408%.

might experience benefits of over three years versus costs of , adding up to an NPV of and an ROI of 0%.

Key Statistics

Return on investment (ROI)

408%408%

Benefits PV

$139.5M$139.5M

Net present value (NPV)

$112.1M$112.1M

Payback

8 months8 months

Benefits (Three-Year)

Customer satisfaction Operations efficiencies Development efficiencies Process quality

TEI Framework And Methodology

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ framework for those organizations considering an investment Camunda.

The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that Camunda can have on an organization.

Due Diligence

Interviewed Camunda stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to Camunda.
Interviews

Interviewed five representatives at four organizations using Camunda to obtain data about costs, benefits, and risks.
Composite Organization

Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewees’ organizations.
Financial Model Framework

Constructed a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewees.
Case Study

Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication of ROI analyses related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology provides a complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions. Please see Appendix A for additional information on the TEI methodology.

Disclosures

Readers should be aware of the following:

This study is commissioned by Camunda and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.

Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the appropriateness of an investment in Camunda.

Camunda reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.

Camunda provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews.

Consulting Team:

Jeffrey Yozwiak

Zahra Azzaoui

Drivers leading to the Camunda investment

Interviews

Role	Industry	Region	Revenue	Employees
Senior manager	Finance	Global	$36B	90,000
IT manager	Real estate	EMEA	$7B	2,000
Enterprise architect	Technology	Global	$4B	10,000
Head of IT standards	Insurance	EMEA	$7B	12,000

Camunda Deployments For Interviewees’ Organizations

Role	Industry	Time Implemented	Use Examples
Senior manager	Finance	5 years	Payment processing (e.g., compliance and approval), Document processing (e.g., for loan applications)
IT manager	Real estate	2 years	Customer service (e.g., managing documents, customer records, and customer communications), Operations management (e.g., managing processes for service provision)
Enterprise architect	Technology	3 years	Finance (e.g., customer billing, compliance and auditing, etc.), Customer service (e.g., chatbot)
Head of IT standards	Insurance	10 years	Operations management (e.g., processes for service provision), Document input processing and document generation, Fraud detection, Customer service (e.g., customer signup and account management)

Key Challenges

Before investing in Camunda, the interviewees’ organizations had limited experience with process orchestration. The interviewees described “pockets” of automation: Some individual processes were partially automated, but processes were not orchestrated end-to-end, and the processes had been automated in ways that would not scale. The IT manager at a real estate organization and interviewees from an insurance organization said this was especially the case for their companies. They explained that before using Camunda, their organizations had no centralized solutions for process orchestration. While the senior manager at a finance organization and the enterprise architect at a technology organization said their companies did have legacy tools for process automation, they reported that process development with the legacy tools was so slow that their organizations decided to seek out alternatives.

The interviewees noted how their organizations struggled with common challenges, including:

Process development using tools with proprietary standards was too slow to meet business needs. The senior manager in the finance industry said their organization’s prior process automation platform — which used proprietary standards — had created a bottleneck because a limited number of resources had the requisite skills to use it. Similarly, the enterprise architect in the technology industry reported their organization’s legacy process automation solution made changing existing processes cumbersome. It could take up to six months to change logic, which they said is an unacceptable delay for a fast-growing company.

An IT manager in the real estate industry pointed out an additional problem: Proprietary standards impeded communication between business stakeholders and IT, and the poor collaboration delayed deliveries and led to subpar solutions.
- The IT manager in the real estate industry explained: “There was an accumulation of technical debt due to misunderstandings. … Basically, you’d work on something, build it, [and] shape it, but it wouldn’t be what the [business] needs, so you’d have to rework it. But there wouldn’t be time to rework it, so you’d end up doing some weird workaround. And you’d have 20 of those workarounds, and then suddenly you’d have 100 of those workarounds, and you’d [end] up with a big mess.”
- The senior manager in finance said: “Typically, developers don’t want to go for proprietary technology because that’s not what they want to do. They want to [use their preferred language].”
Prior solutions could not support necessary levels of process complexity and scale. Interviewees’ organizations sought to orchestrate processes that were complex, high-volume, often spanned multiple business units, and were integral to the businesses. Sometimes, the organizations had automated parts of these processes. But with their prior solutions, they were unable to orchestrate the processes end to end. For example, the IT manager in the real estate industry said their organization’s processes often involved both automated tasks and human work (e.g., customer service). Moreover, these processes often needed to comply with regulations. But because the processes were so complex, the organizations struggled to gain visibility into them.

“[Camunda] seamlessly combines automated tasks with nonautomated tasks. That was a big criterion for us and [so was] scalability. Because, as you can imagine, our systems need to cope with quite a lot. … We have very complicated stuff. [Our market] is highly regulated. … [Camunda] is very flexible and nimble, [and] the faster we can [iterate], the better.”

IT manager, real estate

Investment Objectives

The interviewees’ organizations searched for a solution that could:

Reduce development timelines and increase agility. The interviewees’ organizations looked for a tool that would be accessible to their business stakeholders, so they favored solutions with low-code options and those that use open standards. They believed both qualities would help to standardize communication and thereby improve collaboration between business stakeholders and IT.

In addition, the organizations wanted to decentralize and scale their process development. They believed propriety standards would inhibit widespread adoption, and they looked for a solution that could support an internal process automation practice.

“Firstly, Camunda uses open technology, so we don’t really have a bottleneck in terms of specialty [skills]. Secondly, we can let the business own the business processes. We give [business stakeholders] the power to change processes as they wish, and that adds agility. … Our business partners drive a lot of innovation.”

Senior manager, finance

“Everyone can participate when they see visual communication methods. … Our primary motivation was creating understanding of processes in a multinational context. … [With Camunda,] you don’t have to describe what you want. You can show what you want, and then communication from that point becomes a lot easier.”

IT manager, real estate

Orchestrate the most complex processes end to end and at scale. The interviewees’ organizations already had ways to partially automate processes, but these solutions fell short when the processes were very complex or very high-volume. The organizations sought a solution to specifically support their most challenging business use cases.

The IT architect in insurance explained: “We have automated less than half of the total processes in [our organization] with Camunda. Some processes are so rare that it’s not worth automating them, but of the ones that are worth automating, we don’t have 50% yet. Even for [processes] that we already have automated, there’s always the potential to develop more towards the end-to-end process in some cases because sometimes we only automate the middle part — not the entire process from beginning to end. There are ways we can continue to grow with Camunda by both taking on more processes and expanding the existing processes.”

“We wanted an end-to-end view [of processes]. … What Camunda can do is orchestrate all activities for the whole process end to end, and we weren’t able to do that before.”

Head of IT standards, insurance

Increase visibility into processes to improve them over time. The most complex processes were difficult to track, monitor, and audit, and interviewees said errors in these processes could hurt customers’ experiences or violate regulations. Their organizations hoped that features such as BPMN diagramming would improve documentation, and they looked for a solution with robust analytics capabilities. According to the interviewees, gaining visibility was the first step towards improving the processes over time.
Integrate with existing systems. The legacy systems of the interviewees’ organizations used a variety of technologies — from mainframes to other process automation platforms. The organizations needed a tool flexible enough to integrate with the technologies they were already using, and they sought to fill gaps in their process automation capabilities, not to refactor or re-platform. Easy integrations were a crucial requirement that some solutions were unable to meet.

The IT manager in real estate said: “[Before using Camunda,] we developed a purely no-code and low-code technology strategy for the company. All of our technology is built on no-code and low-code tools, including the back end that runs our entire operation. … We needed a tool that could work well together with the other tools that we use to build technology.”

“Camunda integrated very well with our existing applications and IT landscape. … It has a very open approach.”

IT architect, insurance

Composite Organization

Based on the interviews, Forrester constructed a TEI framework, a composite company, and an ROI analysis that illustrates the areas financially affected. The composite organization is representative of the five interviewees, and it is used to present the aggregate financial analysis in the next section. The composite organization has the following characteristics:

Description of composite. The composite organization is a global, $25 billion-dollar organization with 60,000 employees and 55 million customers. The organization operates in an industry with strict regulatory requirements that vary across the multiple regions in which it operates.

To model the composite organization, Forrester assumes:

The composite has 500 total business processes defined.

has 0 total business processes defined.

Two-hundred or 40% of the composite’s defined business processes are external processes. External processes are the processes that customers interact with while receiving services from the composite organization. Examples of such processes might include customer support and the provision of core business services.

At , 0 business processes might be external.

Three-hundred or 60% of the composite’s defined business processes are internal processes. Its internal processes are crucial to business operations, but they are not customer-facing. Examples of such processes include finance, legal, and human resources administration as well as back-office operations.

At , 0 business processes might be internal.

The average number of instances per process per year is 328,000. A process instance is a single occurrence of a process. Although a minority of processes at the composite organization run millions of times per year, most run hundreds of thousands of times per year.²

For , the average number of instances per process per year might be 0.

The composite organization has an operating margin of 12%. This operating margin is industry-agnostic and is the market average for the US private sector.³

is assumed to have an operating margin of 0%.

Deployment characteristics. Initially, the composite organization has low levels of process orchestration maturity and Camunda usage. It uses Camunda, but it does so only for scattered projects siloed across the organization.

Starting in Year 1, the composite organization strategically invests in process orchestration with Camunda. A central team in IT supports wider adoption of Camunda throughout the organization (e.g., by creating templates and documentation, organizing internal meetups, and otherwise enabling disparate groups interested in process orchestration). Because of the composite organization’s efforts, the number of business processes orchestrated with Camunda increases by 75% per year — from 25 processes or 5% of processes initially to 140 processes or 28% of processes in Year 3.

At , 0% of processes might be orchestrated with Camunda in Year 1, 0% orchestrated in Year 2, and 0% orchestrated in Year 3.

The composite organization also improves its processes over time. This is reflected by how much an orchestrated process is automated. Forrester assumes that initially, most of the processes the composite orchestrates with Camunda are only 60% automated, which means 40% of the steps are still performed manually. Thanks to the composite organization’s efforts, the percentage of automation increases by 10% each year. By Year 3, processes orchestrated with Camunda are 80% automated. Because these processes are so complex, it is impossible to automate them completely. However, increasing the level of automation can still save time and reduce errors.

Key Assumptions

$25 billion annual revenue
60,000 employees
55 million customers
500 business processes

The table below further details Forrester’s assumptions for the composite organization.

Composite Organization

Ref.	Metric	Source	Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
R1	Revenue before using Camunda	CompositeComposite	$25,000,000,000$25,000,000,000	$25,000,000,000$25,000,000,000	$25,000,000,000$25,000,000,000	$25,000,000,000$25,000,000,000
R2	Operating margin	CompositeComposite	12%12%	12%12%	12%12%	12%12%
R3	Customers	CompositeComposite	55,000,00055,000,000	55,000,00055,000,000	55,000,00055,000,000	55,000,00055,000,000
R4	Average revenue per customer	R1/R3	$455$455	$455$455	$455$455	$455$455
R5	Employees	CompositeComposite	60,00060,000	60,00060,000	60,00060,000	60,00060,000
R6	Average employee salary (fully burdened)	Composite	$96,000$96,000	$96,000$96,000	$96,000$96,000	$96,000$96,000
R7	Average employee hourly wage (fully burdened)	R6/2,080	$46$46	$46$46	$46$46	$46$46
R8	Business processes	CompositeComposite	500500	500500	500500	500500
R9	Average instances per process	CompositeComposite	328,000328,000	328,000328,000	328,000328,000	328,000328,000
R10	Percentage of orchestrated processes that are automated	Composite; R10PY*(100%+R11)	60%60%	60%60%	60%60%	60%60%
R11	Increase in percentage of orchestrated processes that are automated	Composite	0%0%	0%0%	0%0%	0%0%
R12	Percentage of processes that are external/customer-facing	CompositeComposite	40%40%	40%40%	40%40%	40%40%
R13	External business processes	R8*R12	200200	200200	200200	200200
R14	Internal business processes	R8*(100%-R12)	300300	300300	300300	300300
R15	Percentage of processes orchestrated with Camunda	CompositeComposite	5%5%	9%9%	16%16%	28%28%
R16	External processes orchestrated with Camunda	R8R12R15	1010	1818	3232	5656
R17	External processes not orchestrated with Camunda	R13-R16	190190	182182	168168	144144
R18	Internal processes orchestrated with Camunda	R8(100%-R12)R15	1515	2727	4848	8484
R29	Internal processes not orchestrated with Camunda	R14-R18	285285	273273	252252	216216

Quantified benefit data as applied to the composite

Total Benefits

Ref.	Benefit	Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Total	Present Value
Atr	Customer satisfaction	$0$0	$7,872,077$7,872,077	$18,892,858$18,892,858	$46,602,317$46,602,317	$73,367,251$73,367,251	$57,783,376$57,783,376
Btr	Operations efficiencies	$0$0	$7,966,464$7,966,464	$24,116,659$24,116,659	$52,506,240$52,506,240	$84,589,363$84,589,363	$66,622,079$66,622,079
Ctr	Development efficiencies	$0$0	$61,051 $61,051	$200,796 $200,796	$523,306 $523,306	$785,152 $785,152	$614,615 $614,615
Dtr	Process quality	$0$0	$1,773,698$1,773,698	$5,132,138$5,132,138	$11,526,255$11,526,255	$18,432,090$18,432,090	$14,513,734$14,513,734
	Total benefits (risk-adjusted)	$0$0	$17,673,289$17,673,289	$48,342,450$48,342,450	$111,158,117$111,158,117	$177,173,857$177,173,857	$139,533,804$139,533,804

Customer Satisfaction

Evidence and data. Interviewees said that by using Camunda to orchestrate and automate external processes (i.e., processes that directly serve customers) their organizations improved their customers’ experiences. Completing common tasks including everything from customer support (e.g., account changes) to business services (e.g., loan application or claims processing) became faster and higher quality. Ultimately, improving services impacted the organizations’ top-line revenues.

“The customer experience increased dramatically. You cannot measure that in euros or dollars, but it has an impact that management sees.”

Head of IT standards, insurance

The head of IT standards and IT architect at the insurance organization said their company used Camunda for claims processing and customer support. They reported that automating the processes with Camunda significantly reduced completion times.
The head of IT standards explained: “If you have the happy path, and [the process] runs through, then the [reduction in time to complete] is very high — from days to hours or even minutes if everything is fine. It’s pretty impressive.”

The head of IT standards concluded: “We have a more customer-centric perspective on processes. ‘Where does [the process] start and end? How long is the time between? How convenient is [the process for] the customer? … What kind of feedback does the customer want? … When do we send them an email with information?’ … We save a lot of work and time with Camunda, but we also keep in mind what is necessary for the customer.”

The IT manager at the real estate organization said their company deployed Camunda to orchestrate all processes related to tenant experience — from pricing (e.g., determining rents) and customer support (e.g., maintenance requests) to customer onboarding (e.g., generating rental agreements).

After orchestrating such processes with Camunda, the interviewees said their organization reduced vacancies by 30% and discovered that the prices of 30% of its properties needed to be increased. Automation enabled the organization to serve an increasing number of customers as the business grew.

The IT manager described how using Camunda to support services improved customer experience: “The people who take advantage of what we have to offer in the digital space tend to be very satisfied. They get help faster. … Services like this [orchestrated with Camunda] not only increase customer satisfaction, but they are also unique to our industry and our business.”

The same interviewee also explained how orchestrating processes with Camunda enabled scale: “We were growing quickly and trying to cope with volume. When we launched the process [for pricing], we identified a lot of apartments that should have had a rent increase before but hadn’t had one. Whether or not that was an oversight is hard to say, but when you put things into a system and a process, that’s when you capture all the opportunities. … Doing it this way [with Camunda] enables us to do it at scale. Whereas, before, when the process was manual, we lost out on opportunities because we just couldn’t cope with the volume.”

“Being able to do more with less [is important]. … The amount of contracts we’re able to produce and the amount of movements we’re able to handle has dramatically increased. … [It’s] pretty significant for us.”

IT manager, real estate

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

The composite organization has 200 external or customer-facing business processes, and each process averages 328,000 instances per year.

might have 0 external business processes, and each process might average 0 instances per year.

On average, there are 1.2 external process instances per customer. In most cases (e.g., core business services), an external process serves just one customer every time it occurs. However, some customers interact with some external processes (e.g., customer support) multiple times per year, which increases the average.⁴

At , on average, there are 0 external process instances per customer.

Over time, as the composite organization invests in managing more processes with Camunda, the number of customers served by non-orchestrated processes decreases and the number of customers served by orchestrated processes increases.
Non-orchestrated processes have an 80% customer retention rate. The composite organization provides good customer service most of the time.

At , non-orchestrated processes might have a customer retention rate of 0%.

The composite organization’s orchestrated processes initially have an 84% customer retention rate, and its customer retention rate for orchestrated processes increases to 86% in Year 3 as the organization increasingly automates and improves its processes.
- Orchestrating a process can retain only a small percentage of the customers who churn. Automation improves service speed and quality. Faster services improve the composite’s customer experiences and allow it to retain more customers. However, this is only a small percentage (less than 10%) of the total customers who churn. Most customers churn for other reasons
- The percentage of additional customers the composite organization retains through orchestration is proportional to the level of process automation. As the composite increasingly automates its orchestrated processes, it retains marginally more customers.

At , orchestrated processes initially might have a customer retention rate of 0%. The customer retention rate for orchestrated processes might increase to 0% in Year 3 as increasingly automates and improves its processes.

The composite organization’s aggregate customer retention rate increases from 80% initially to 82% in Year 3. As it orchestrates more processes with Camunda, it retains more customers.

For , the aggregate customer retention rate might increase from 0% initially to 0% in Year 3. As orchestrates more processes with Camunda, it might retain more customers.

1.27 million

Incremental customers retained through orchestration and automation over three years

Incremental customers potentially retained through orchestration and automation over three years at

The composite organization’s average revenue per year per customer retained is $600. For the organization as a whole, the average revenue per customer per year is $455. However, the incremental customers retained through orchestration and automation are slightly higher value.⁵

For , the average revenue per year per customer retained might be $0. For as a whole, the average revenue per customer per year might be $0. However, the incremental customers retained through orchestration and automation might be slightly higher value.

Risks. There are multiple ways in which this benefit will vary from organization to organization. Overall, the model is moderately sensitive to changes to any of the assumptions about the composite organization (e.g., number of processes, percentage of processes orchestrated with Camunda, average instances per process, operating margin, etc.)

In addition, this particular benefit is sensitive to changes to any of the following variables:

Average retention rate for non-orchestrated processes.
Percentage of lost customers who can be retained by customer experiences improved with orchestration and automation.
Average revenue per customer retained.

Small changes to these variables can have large impacts on the results.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $57.8 million.

For , this benefit might have a three-year, risk-adjusted PV of .

Customer Satisfaction

Ref.	Metric	Source		Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
A1	External business processes	R13		200200	200200	200200	200200
A2	Average instances per process	R9		328,000328,000	328,000328,000	328,000328,000	328,000328,000
A3	Percentage of processes orchestrated with Camunda	R15		5%5%	9%9%	16%16%	28%28%
A4	Average instances per external process per customer	CompositeComposite		1.21.2	1.21.2	1.21.2	1.21.2
A5	Customers served by non-orchestrated processes	A1A2(100%-A3)/A4		51,933,33351,933,333	49,746,66749,746,667	45,920,00045,920,000	39,360,00039,360,000
A6	Customers served by orchestrated processes	A1A2A3/A4		2,733,3332,733,333	4,920,0004,920,000	8,746,6678,746,667	15,306,66715,306,667
A7	Average retention rate for non-orchestrated processes	CompositeComposite		80%80%	80%80%	80%80%	80%80%
A8	For an orchestrated process: Percentage of process that is automated	R10		60%60%	66%66%	73%73%	80%80%
A9	Percentage of lost customers who can be retained by customer experiences improved with orchestration and automation	A9Y0/A8Y0*A8		5%5%	6%6%	6%6%	7%7%
A10	Average retention rate for orchestrated processes	A7*(100%+A9)		84%84%	85%85%	85%85%	86%86%
A11	Customers retained from non-orchestrated processes	A5*A7		41,546,66641,546,666	39,797,33439,797,334	36,736,00036,736,000	31,488,00031,488,000
A12	Customers retained from orchestrated processes	A6*A10		2,296,0002,296,000	4,182,0004,182,000	7,434,6677,434,667	13,163,73413,163,734
A13	Aggregate customers retained	A11+A12		43,842,66643,842,666	43,979,33443,979,334	44,170,66744,170,667	44,651,73444,651,734
A14	Aggregate customer retention rate	A13/(A5+A6)		80%80%	80%80%	81%81%	82%82%
A15	Incremental customers retained due to orchestration and automation with Camunda	A13-A13Y0		00	136,668136,668	328,001328,001	809,068809,068
A16	Average revenue per customer retained	CompositeComposite		$600$600	$600$600	$600$600	$600$600
A17	Operating margin	R2		12%12%	12%12%	12%12%	12%12%
At	Customer satisfaction	A15A16A17		$0$0	$9,840,096$9,840,096	$23,616,072$23,616,072	$58,252,896$58,252,896
	Risk adjustment	↓20%
Atr	Customer satisfaction (risk-adjusted)			$0$0	$7,872,077$7,872,077	$18,892,858$18,892,858	$46,602,317$46,602,317
Three-year total: $73,367,251$73,367,251			Three-year present value: $57,783,376$57,783,376

Operations Efficiencies

Evidence and data. By using Camunda to orchestrate and automate internal processes, the interviewees’ organizations made their operations drastically more efficient, and they also used it to orchestrate their most complex processes. Interviewees said automation not only saved employees countless hours of manual work, but it also supported business growth. For example, the interviewees from the real estate and the insurance organizations said process volumes grew even as staffing levels remained constant and process orchestration made employees more productive.

“Camunda allows us to automate processes that we couldn’t [automate before]. We can now automate processes that would typically be done manually and that need to integrate with a lot of systems. That was not easy to do with [our prior solution].”

IT architect, insurance

The IT manager in the real estate industry explained: “In regulated markets, being able to know and work within the regulations of the local country is extremely important. … Especially when you have so many different edge cases and so many different things that can happen in a process, being able to orchestrate that at scale is insanely impactful.”

For example, the interviewee said their organization used to have 80 employees who just oversaw rent increases. By orchestrating and automating the process, the organization kept up with increased volume with only a quarter of the employees required before. Automating the process freed employees to perform higher-value tasks like providing better customer service.

The IT manager described another example of time savings: “The [rental] termination process is a pretty complicated process. … It used to take us almost two months to facilitate a termination. Now, we’re down to maybe a month.”

The IT manager added that their organization had cobbled together a varied IT landscape as it acquired subsidiaries, and they said one strength of Camunda was that it integrated with all these legacy IT systems and orchestrated complex processes that spanned multiple systems.

The interviewee concluded: “In terms of our future state, we plan to continue expanding our Camunda use and roll it out [globally]. We plan to expand to up to 100 million [process instances].”

The IT architect in insurance said their organization uses Camunda to orchestrate its document input process: “Last year, we had 37 million process instances, and 10 million of those were from document input. It causes roughly 25% of all process instances just because there are such vast volumes.”

The interviewee also explained the efficiencies gained: “It’s working really well for [us.] [Previously,] a lot of the tasks were done manually. … We had a [document] classification tool, but we were not able to bring the information from the document into an automated process. … Almost all of the tasks are now done automatically. [The number of documents input staff teams] has decreased from three teams to two teams. … The amount of documents is increasing, but the [number] of people doing the work is decreasing.” They said automation freed up the employees to perform higher value tasks elsewhere in the organization.

The head of IT standards at the organization also noted that Camunda can orchestrate complex processes across multiple IT systems: “We have some special applications that run within one system. But, normally, we orchestrate at least two different systems. … I would say 95% of our processes use more than one system or have endpoints in more than one system.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

The composite organization has 300 internal or back-office business processes, and each process averages 328,000 instances per year.

might have 0 internal business processes, and each process might average 0 instances per year.

Over time, as the composite organization invests in orchestrating more processes with Camunda, the number of non-orchestrated process instances decreases while the number of orchestrated process instances increases.
The composite’s average time to manually complete non-orchestrated process instances is 0.4 hours or 24 minutes. Although some internal processes take hours to perform manually, the organization can manually complete the majority of internal processes in less than one hour.⁶

For , the average time to manually complete non-orchestrated process instances might be 0 hours.

The average time to complete orchestrated process instances is proportional to the level of automation.
- Initially, the composite’s orchestrated process instances are 58% faster than its non-orchestrated processes instances. However, over time, the organization improves and increasingly automates its orchestrated processes. By Year 3, its orchestrated process instances are 75% faster.
- Automation reduces the composite’s process completion times by 95%. Although automation significantly reduces process completion times, it does not completely eliminate all time and costs associated with performing processes. For example, processes that are 60% automated are 58% faster (60%*95%).

For , the average time to complete orchestrated process instances might be 0 hours initially. This might fall to 0 hours in Year 3 as increasingly automates its orchestrated processes.

As the composite organization orchestrates a greater percentage of its internal processes with Camunda, the total employee time required to perform internal processes falls. This benefit is the value of the incremental hours of employee time saved.
Full-time employees work 2,080 hours per year.
In Year 1, the total time saved is equal to 520 FTEs. In Year 2, the employee time saved totals 1,575 FTEs. And by Year 3, it totals 3,430 FTEs. This allows employees to shift from spending their time performing tedious manual tasks to focus on higher-value work.

For , the employee time saved might be 0 hours in Year 1, 0 hours in Year 2, and 0 hours in Year 3.

The average employee fully burdened hourly wage is $46.⁷
Forrester applied a conservative productivity recapture rate of 20%. While the aggregate time savings across the composite organization are large, the annual time savings per employee are relatively small (e.g., around 18 hours in Year 1, 55 hours in Year 2, and 119 hours in Year 3). Realistically, the organization’s employees recapture only some of that time for activities that generate business value. Most of the time is absorbed by less-productive activities (e.g., emails, meetings, coffee breaks, etc.).

0 FTEs

Potential employee time savings over three years at

In addition, this particular benefit is sensitive to changes to the following variables:

Average time per non-orchestrated process instance.
Average time per orchestrated process instance.
Average employee hourly wage.
Productivity recapture.

Small changes to these variables can have large impacts on the results.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $66.6 million.

For , this benefit might have a three-year, risk-adjusted PV of .

Operations Efficiencies

Ref.	Metric	Source		Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
B1	Internal business processes	R14		300300	300300	300300	300300
B2	Average instances per process	R9		328,000328,000	328,000328,000	328,000328,000	328,000328,000
B3	Aggregate internal process instances	B1*B2		98,400,00098,400,000	98,400,00098,400,000	98,400,00098,400,000	98,400,00098,400,000
B4	Percentage of processes orchestrated with Camunda	R15		5%5%	9%9%	16%16%	28%28%
B5	Non-orchestrated internal process instances	B1(100%-B4)B2		93,480,00093,480,000	89,544,00089,544,000	82,656,00082,656,000	70,848,00070,848,000
B6	Orchestrated internal process instances	B1B4B2		4,920,0004,920,000	8,856,0008,856,000	15,744,00015,744,000	27,552,00027,552,000
B7	Average time per non-orchestrated process instance (hours)	CompositeComposite		0.400.40	0.400.40	0.400.40	0.400.40
B8	Percentage of orchestrated process that is automated	R10		60%60%	66%66%	73%73%	80%80%
B9	Average time per orchestrated process instance (hours)	B7(100%-B895%)		0.170.17	0.150.15	0.120.12	0.100.10
B10	Employee time to perform non-orchestrated internal processes (hours)	B5*B7		37,392,00037,392,000	35,817,60035,817,600	33,062,40033,062,400	28,339,20028,339,200
B11	Employee time to perform orchestrated internal processes (hours)	B6*B9		836,400836,400	1,328,4001,328,400	1,889,2801,889,280	2,755,2002,755,200
B12	Total employee time to perform internal processes	B10+B11		38,228,40038,228,400	37,146,00037,146,000	34,951,68034,951,680	31,094,40031,094,400
B13	Employee time saved on internal processes due to orchestration and automation with Camunda (hours)	B12Y0-B12		00	1,082,4001,082,400	3,276,7203,276,720	7,134,0007,134,000
B14	Average employee hourly wage (fully burdened)	R7		$46$46	$46$46	$46$46	$46$46
B15	Productivity recapture	TEI standard		20%20%	20%20%	20%20%	20%20%
Bt	Operations efficiencies	B13B14B15		$0$0	$9,958,080$9,958,080	$30,145,824$30,145,824	$65,632,800$65,632,800
	Risk adjustment	↓20%
Btr	Operations efficiencies (risk-adjusted)			$0$0	$7,966,464$7,966,464	$24,116,659$24,116,659	$52,506,240$52,506,240
Three-year total: $84,589,363$84,589,363			Three-year present value: $66,622,079$66,622,079

Development Efficiencies

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that their organizations developed new processes and changed existing processes up to twice as quickly with Camunda compared to their previous solutions, due to the following reasons:

Because Camunda uses open standards, there were no skills bottlenecks and more users could participate in process automation efforts.
Camunda made it easy to reuse components, thereby accelerating development.
Camunda provided ways for business and IT teams to visually discuss, design, and improve processes, which improved communication and collaboration between business stakeholders and IT.
Camunda improved visibility. Previously, business rules may have been codified in obscure code written by employees no longer at the company. But BPMN documented processes in an accessible, future-proof way.
Camunda made process maintenance easier.
Camunda supported process agility when business requirements inevitably and sometimes frequently changed. After orchestrating processes with Camunda rather than their prior solutions, the interviewees’ organizations saved development time whenever processes changed.

“[Our speed now] is a result of [Camunda’s] open technology because there’s a lower barrier to get into it. We can help to enable you, but you can learn it yourself. And then we don’t have a bandwidth issue. That’s a really big saver.”

Senior manager, finance

The senior manager at the finance organization said that typical projects with Camunda take two to three sprints whereas projects with the organization’s prior process automation platform required four sprints or more. The interviewee said: “[Especially when processes involve] human tasks, [we] can probably build … close to 50% to 100% [faster]. … [Process development] is pretty fast. … It’s not a full-time job for us [because] when [business] changes the flow … changing [the process] is arguably easy.”

They further explained: “The key challenge we had in the past was that because our [prior] solution was more proprietary, we had to have a centralized team to implement stuff, and then we had a bottleneck. We could not [support] broader [business] needs because of bandwidth. … [We had a] skill-set bottleneck. … Right now, what we’re saying is that anybody can use [Camunda]. Because it’s open technology … as long as you’re a developer, go ahead and use it. We’re open to all developers. You have workflow needs, and we have a training recommendation. Go there [to learn].”

They emphasized: “From the business-outcomes angle, [we] for sure [are] faster [because] there is no backlog; you can just do it yourself. And that saves time. … The [development] workflow is roughly the same, but the wait time is dramatically reduced. That [provides] the big savings. … In the future, we want to use data analytics to look at similarities between processes to bridge them together and increase process reuse. This will enable a more dynamic workflow to be able to connect different highways together so they can be faster.”

The senior manager concluded that better collaboration between business stakeholders and IT with Camunda improved their organization’s development productivity: “[Before,] when everything was hiding under code, it was very opaque. [Business stakeholders] didn’t really know what was going on. They would ask IT, they relied on IT, [and sometimes they felt that IT] was not really answering their questions on time, which was not healthy. … [With Camunda,] they can see the process. They really like that. That’s empowering.”

“Teams want to be atomic, and they want to do their own [process development]. Open software is more favorable [to that]. Hence, Camunda as an open source [platform] caught our attention.”

Senior manager, finance

The enterprise architect in the technology industry said before using Camunda, changing a process with their organization’s prior automation platform typically took six months. They explained: “Historically, we made a mistake with our earlier legacy application. … Everything was part of the code. … It failed [because] over 12 years, there was a [large] amount of logic written [into the code], and the developers actually left the company. So [whenever we needed to make a change,] we’d have to reverse engineer the code to identify the business logic. There was no historical [knowledge] of the code in the company. … And we learned our lesson [because] rolling out one feature took six months. It was very tedious to change business rules. That was not sustainable for us, [so] we brought in a solution that provides more agility.”

They continued: “Now, it’s easy. … It’s easy for us to manage [business] rules within DMN. And changing the business process — what is out there in production — [is easy]. … [Using Camunda] is easier for both sets of domain experts. Engineers find it very easy to collaborate with the business people, and business [users find] it very easy to collaborate with the engineering folks … because they are both speaking the same language.”
The IT manager in real estate said: “We’ve automated processes in Camunda, but they are not yet optimal. In our next iteration of those processes, we plan to utilize Camunda in a better way to be able to handle a lot more client interaction than we previously did. We plan to launch that within the next six months.”

“Agility is actually the most important factor from a business perspective. [With Camunda,] we can build features and deploy quickly.”

Enterprise architect, technology

“We are building for the future. We don’t want to build it again in another 15 years, right? … And this was achievable using Camunda.”

Enterprise architect, technology

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

On average, the composite’s processes change once per year.⁸ Processes change when business requirements change (e.g., new regulations, new market conditions, new products and services).

At , processes might change 0 time(s) per year.

When the composite does not orchestrate a process with Camunda, updating it takes eight weeks or 240 hours of development time. Forrester assumes that a developer might focus on development work 75% of the time because they must also attend meetings, answer emails, etc.

At , changing a process not orchestrated with Camunda might take 0 hours of development time.

45%

Less development time required to change processes

Initially, when the composite orchestrates a process with Camunda, changing it takes 13% less time (209 hours) than it did before. By Year 3, changing a process orchestrated with Camunda takes 45% less time (132 hours).
The composite’s process development times decrease as it increases its investment in Camunda (e.g., developers become more familiar with the platform, etc.).

For , changing a process orchestrated with Camunda might take 0% less time initially and up to 0% less time by Year 3. Process development times might decrease as increases its investment in Camunda.

As the composite organization orchestrates a greater percentage of its processes with Camunda, the aggregate time that IT spends implementing process changes falls. Initially and in Year 1, the composite organization has 57 FTEs who work on changing processes. These employees are in a variety of roles (e.g., business analysts, developers). By Year 3, the number of FTEs falls to 50, which frees seven IT FTEs to perform other tasks.

might avoid 0 hours of development time in Year 1, 0 hours in Year 2, and 0 hours in Year 3.

Potential hours of development time saved at

The composite’s processes are developed by business analysts and developers. Initially and in Year 1, developers handle all of the process development work. However, as the organization invests more into Camunda, its business analysts increasingly participate in process development work.
Business analysts earn a lower salary than developers, so as business analysts become more involved in process development, the aggregate average hourly rate for everyone who develops and changes processes falls.⁹
Forrester conservatively applied a productivity recapture rate of 80%. Developers and business analysts spend most of the time they save on activities that generate business value, but some of their saved time is still siphoned away by less-productive activities (e.g., emails, meetings, coffee breaks, etc.).

In addition, this particular benefit is somewhat sensitive to changes to the following variables:

Average changes per process.
Average development time per non-orchestrated process change.
Average development time per orchestrated process change.
Aggregate average hourly wage for developers and business analysts.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 5%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $615,000.

For , this benefit might have a three-year, risk-adjusted PV of .

Development Efficiencies

Ref.	Metric	Source		Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
C1	Non-orchestrated processes	R8-(R17+R19)		475475	455455	420420	360360
C2	Orchestrated processes	R17+R19		2525	4545	8080	140140
C3	Average changes per process	CompositeComposite		11	11	11	11
C4	Average development timeline per non-orchestrated process change (weeks)	InterviewsInterviews		88	88	88	88
C5	Average development time per non-orchestrated process change (hours)	C44075%		240240	240240	240240	240240
C6	Percent reduction in development time per orchestrated process change	InterviewsInterviews		13%13%	20%20%	30%30%	45%45%
C7	Average development time per orchestrated process change (hours)	C5*(100%-C6)		209209	192192	168168	132132
C8	Aggregate development time spent on process changes (hours)	C1C3C5+C2C3 C7		119,225119,225	117,840117,840	114,240114,240	104,880104,880
C9	Development time avoided (hours)	C8Y0-C8		00	1,3851,385	4,9854,985	14,34514,345
C10	Aggregate average hourly wage of developers and business analysts (fully burdened)	Composite		$58$58	$58$58	$53$53	$48$48
C11	Productivity recapture	TEI standard		80%80%	80%80%	80%80%	80%80%
Ct	Development efficiencies	C9C10C11		$0$0	$64,264$64,264	$211,364$211,364	$550,848$550,848
	Risk adjustment	↓5%
Ctr	Development efficiencies (risk-adjusted)			$0$0	$61,051$61,051	$200,796$200,796	$523,306$523,306
Three-year total: $785,152$785,152			Three-year present value: $614,615$614,615

“The beauty is that we make money along the way, [and] we create efficiencies along the way. It’s not like we wait a year and then we launch something. After that first meeting [between IT and business stakeholders], we start generating efficiencies. The hidden cost of technology is waiting around for stuff to be finished, [and we are not] as efficient as possible.”

IT manager, real estate

Process Quality

Evidence and data. Interviewees said that by orchestrating processes with Camunda, their organizations improved the quality of their processes in three ways:

Orchestration and automation reduced opportunities for errors and increased compliance.
Orchestration provided visibility into complex processes, which enabled the organizations to improve their processes over time along a variety of dimensions.
As the organizations used Camunda more widely, they began to standardize their processes (e.g., effective patterns for orchestrating human tasks became reusable and standard).

“When you have [a complex] process, a BPMN visualization [in Camunda] is a powerful thing.”

Senior manager, finance

The enterprise architect in the technology industry said their organization used Camunda to create standard patterns for processes involving documents and human tasks. They explained that by creating these reusable patterns in Camunda, the organization not only reduced process development times, but it also improved the quality of all processes using these patterns — which is about half of its total processes.
The senior manager in the finance industry said that using Camunda improved visibility into complex processes that had previously been opaque. Camunda empowered the business team members to improve the processes.
The head of IT standards in the insurance industry said: “We’ve been doing a lot refactoring of our existing automations. … It makes more sense to migrate [them] to Camunda because we have more possibilities for user task handling and stuff like that. … And for a lot of our internal processes — which go over several systems — within each system, we have a lot of automation potential where we can use Camunda, as well.”

“The power of [Camunda] is that the business team owns the process.”

Senior manager, finance

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

The composite’s processes not orchestrated by Camunda have an average error rate of 0.084%, which means that 0.084% of non-orchestrated process instances have errors. To calculate this error rate, Forrester assumes the error rates of the composite’s non-orchestrated processes are normally distributed: 68% of its processes have an error rate of 0.01%; 27% of its processes have an error rate of 0.1%; and 5% of its processes have an error rate of 1%. Based on this distribution, the weighted average error rate for the composite’s non-orchestrated processes is 0.084%.

At , non-orchestrated processes might have an error rate of 0%.

The composite’s error rate for processes orchestrated with Camunda is proportional to the level of automation. As the organization increasingly automates orchestrated processes, its average error rate for orchestrated processes falls from 0.032% initially to 0.016% in Year 3. Automation eliminates 95% of the composite’s errors.

For , orchestrated processes might have an error rate of 0% in Year 1, 0% in Year 2, and 0% in Year 3. The error rate might fall as orchestrated processes are increasingly automated.

As the composite organization orchestrates an increasing number of processes with Camunda, its number of aggregate process errors falls.
The average cost per process error is $475. Usually, remediating process errors entails performing processes over again. Thus, in most cases, the cost of a process error is the time to redo the process manually. However, in some cases, process errors lead to regulatory violations and fines. The higher costs of such errors pull up the average cost per error.¹⁰

At , the average cost per error might be $0.

In addition, this particular benefit is sensitive to changes to any of the following variables:

Average error rate for non-orchestrated processes.
Average error rate for orchestrated processes.
Average cost per process error.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $14.5 million.

For , this benefit might have a three-year, risk-adjusted PV of .

Process Quality

Ref.	Metric	Source		Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
D1	Non-orchestrated processes	R8-(R17+R19)		475475	455455	420420	360360
D2	Orchestrated processes	R17+R19		2525	4545	8080	140140
D3	Average instances per process	R9		328,000328,000	328,000328,000	328,000328,000	328,000328,000
D4	Average error rate for non-orchestrated processes	CompositeComposite		0.084%0.084%	0.084%0.084%	0.084%0.084%	0.084%0.084%
D5	Errors in non-orchestrated processes	D1D3D4		130,872130,872	125,362125,362	115,718115,718	99,18799,187
D6	Percentage of orchestrated process that is automated	R10		60%60%	66%66%	73%73%	80%80%
D7	Average error rate for orchestrated processes	D4(100%-D6)95%		0.032%0.032%	0.027%0.027%	0.022%0.022%	0.016%0.016%
D8	Errors in orchestrated processes	D2D3D7		2,6242,624	3,9853,985	5,7735,773	7,3477,347
D9	Aggregate process errors	D5+D8		133,496133,496	129,347129,347	121,491121,491	106,534106,534
D10	Incremental errors avoided with orchestration and automation	D9Y0-D9		00	4,1494,149	12,00512,005	26,96226,962
D11	Average cost per process error	CompositeComposite		$475$475	$475$475	$475$475	$475$475
Dt	Process quality	D10*D11		$0$0	$1,970,775$1,970,775	$5,702,375$5,702,375	$12,806,950$12,806,950
	Risk adjustment	↓10%
Dtr	Process quality (risk-adjusted)			$0$0	$1,773,698$1,773,698	$5,132,138$5,132,138	$11,526,255$11,526,255
Three-year total: $18,432,090$18,432,090			Three-year present value: $14,513,734$14,513,734

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

Improved collaboration between business and IT. Interviewees said more seamless collaboration between business stakeholders and IT led to faster development timelines. The organizations were able to leverage Camunda’s process mapping capabilities, such as BPMN, to reduce barriers to communication between technical and non-technical users. The visual modeling language allowed for more standardized communication across departments, which, in turn, eliminated bottlenecks to deliver value to customers more quickly.
- The head of IT standards at the insurance organization explained: “[Using Camunda] is a good way for both IT and business users to work together to automate and improve upon business processes. By using the BPMN method and notation, Camunda makes it easy to work together on a process model.”
- The IT manager in real estate said: “Camunda’s diagrams indicate visual communication right off the bat because you get to see what the person is communicating. ... When you say, ‘I see what you’re saying,’ not only do you understand it, but you’re actually able to see it and view it from your own lens. That is pretty powerful.”
  
  They elaborated: “I’ve spent 20 years building technology, both as a developer and in management, and … I’ve always struggled with the barriers that are put in place between the people who know technology and the people who don’t. … So, the main benefit of not only Camunda, but [of] our whole strategy, is that people are actually communicating with each other. … I’ve spent 20 years searching for this.”
  
  The interviewee continued: “[People are] creating results together. The proof is in the pudding. [They’ve] gained confidence, they’re showing results, and they’re showing them together. I wouldn’t say it has been without bumps in the road because there are always those.”
  
  The IT manager concluded: “Camunda allows us to have people working in and understanding the same tool. … With the visual communication language, it’s easy to see whether your input has been taken into account [and to] have a dialogue around it. … It’s about participation … [and] actually inviting feedback and utilizing that feedback to make what we’re building better. … You can write in text, but when you see [a process] visually like you do in Camunda, that’s way more powerful.”

“Camunda is the best tool I’ve seen [for] communication.”

IT manager, real estate

- The senior manager in the finance industry said: “Camunda … gives the right tool to the right people so they can do their best [work]. … Arguably, developers are not the best at workflow diagramming. It’s process analysts who are really at good BPMN diagramming. So, we give the right tool to each specialist to let them do their best [work]. … That’s really accelerated speed. It’s enabled success.”

“Camunda makes it very easy for engineers to collaborate with business users and [vice versa] because they are now both talking in the same language.”

Enterprise architect, technology

Improved visibility into processes. Through improved visibility into end-to-end processes, organizations gained a better understanding of their processes and identified areas for improvement. The ability to monitor and assess current practices at a high level enabled more informed decision-making, optimized workflows, and ultimately enhanced overall organizational efficiency.
- The senior manager in finance explained: “As a financial institution, process automation is a huge aspect of our operation. We should be able to track anything that comes into our organization. We want to be able to help our customers know what stage of their request they are in and when they can expect their request to be completed.”
  They continued: “We want to have visibility of all our processes. Having a single tool that provides insight into the process our teams are involved in helps us determine capacity more easily. Once team members are done with one process, having improved visibility allows us to identify their completion and assign them to a new task.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Camunda and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

Business growth. By optimizing both internal and external processes with Camunda, their organizations are better equipped to handle the increasing volume and complexity of workloads. Improving the efficiency of end-to-end processes allowed the organizations to save time and resources while increasing bandwidth, which ultimately enabled the growth and expansion of their operations. The organizations were also able to use Camunda’s open-source components to create new functionalities to address more specific business challenges. Through improved business agility, the organizations were able to leverage these efficiencies to remain competitive in the market.

The IT manager in real estate explained their company’s future plans to expand its Camunda usage to expand organizational bandwidth: “Our current processes that are supported by Camunda are not as optimal as we would like them to be. We have plans to fully utilize Camunda in a better way to handle a lot more interaction than we previously did. That is our next project.”

The enterprise architect at the technology organization said: “We plan to use more of Camunda’s features and automate processes for additional use cases. Our future plans entail taking on a more scalable approach in the way we use Camunda.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Appendix A).

“Over the years, we have had some points in time where we needed some functionality that wasn’t included in Camunda. But because it’s so open, we could develop it ourselves. We are also able to place a feature request with Camunda to let them know that we have built something new and would like to have that in the product as well.”

IT architect, insurance

Quantified cost data as applied to the composite

Total Costs

Ref.	Cost	Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Total	Present Value
Etr	Camunda costs	$240,000$240,000	$480,000$480,000	$960,000$960,000	$1,680,000$1,680,000	$3,360,000$3,360,000	$2,731,961$2,731,961
Ftr	Process development	$6,328,380$6,328,380	$4,984,752$4,984,752	$6,987,414$6,987,414	$8,546,688$8,546,688	$26,847,234$26,847,234	$23,055,948$23,055,948
Gtr	Training for new Camunda users	$27,562$27,562	$18,374$18,374	$27,984$27,984	$32,947$32,947	$106,867$106,867	$92,147$92,147
Htr	Platform administration	$238,867$238,867	$286,653$286,653	$338,315$338,315	$425,040$425,040	$1,288,876$1,288,876	$1,098,399$1,098,399
Itr	Employee retraining/change management	$169,763$169,763	$99,682$99,682	$113,597$113,597	$175,582$175,582	$558,624$558,624	$486,182$486,182
	Total costs (risk-adjusted)	$7,004,572$7,004,572	$5,869,462$5,869,462	$8,427,310$8,427,310	$10,860,257$10,860,257	$32,161,601$32,161,601	$27,464,637$27,464,637

Camunda Costs

Evidence and data. The interviewees reported that Camunda is cost-effective compared to alternative platforms, and they said they appreciate the high level of enterprise support Camunda provided. Because Camunda licensing costs are based on platform usage, Camunda remained cost-effective both during the organizations’ initial deployments and as they expanded and scaled.

“It’s fun to work with Camunda.”

Head of IT standards, insurance

The IT manager in the real estate industry described how investing in Camunda paid off sooner than investing in an alternative platform would have: “Compared to a lot of the other systems we could have gone out and bought, [Camunda] was not too steep a price tag for a company like ours. But that didn’t mean we didn’t have to justify it. It’s just that [with Camunda], the journey was simpler. [A monolithic competitor] would have cost us millions [to start].”
The head of IT standards in the insurance industry applauded the level of support Camunda provided: “The support from the Camunda team is great. When we ask them to do a speech on our BPM Community Day or even just answer questions, they just do it. So it’s great to work together with them.”

The IT architect added: “Camunda has really good customer involvement. [We have] regular calls with our customer success manager, and that’s a good way to constantly keep in touch with Camunda — to tell them what we’re doing and to get to know what they’re working on and how we can use that.”
The enterprise architect in the technology industry also noted: “We are pretty mature now, but we still have about 10 to 12 hours a year to consult with Camunda on an as-needed basis. Besides that, Camunda has [a network of] consulting companies [and] contractors who can help with transformational programs.”

Modeling and assumptions. Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

A “project scope” can be considered a major, planned use case for process orchestration. Any major use case for process orchestration includes multiple processes.
Forrester assumes the composite organization’s project scope includes around 20 processes.
Each of the composite’s project scopes entail Camunda platform usage that cost it $200,000 each year.

Each of the project scopes at might entail Camunda platform usage costing $0 per year.

Camunda usage costs include a combination of costs for process instances, decision instances, and task users.
Pricing may vary. For more information, contact Camunda.

Pricing for may vary based on a variety of factors. For more information, contact Camunda.

In addition, this particular cost is sensitive to changes to the following variables:

Project scopes.
Cost per project scope.

Both variables are highly dependent on the specifics of each use case.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $2.7 million.

For , this cost might have a three-year, risk-adjusted PV of .

Camunda Costs

Ref.	Metric	Source		Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
E1	Orchestrated processes	C2		2525	4545	8080	140140
E2	Project scopes	E1/20		11	22	44	77
E3	Cost per project scope	CompositeComposite		$200,000$200,000	$200,000$200,000	$200,000$200,000	$200,000$200,000
Et	Camunda costs	E2*E3		$200,000$200,000	$400,000$400,000	$800,000$800,000	$1,400,000$1,400,000
	Risk adjustment	↑20%
Etr	Camunda costs (risk-adjusted)			$240,000$240,000	$480,000$480,000	$960,000$960,000	$1,680,000$1,680,000
Three-year total: $3,360,000$3,360,000			Three-year present value: $2,731,961$2,731,961

Process Development

Evidence and data. The biggest cost for the interviewees’ organizations was the effort they devoted to developing and automating processes. According to the interviewees, it took between three and 12 months to build processes of varying complexity or their organization’s specific use cases.

Each of the interviewees’ organizations developed processes incrementally: They started by automating a select number of core processes and then eventually ramped up to add more complex processes that required heavier Camunda usage. Organizations with more sophisticated development teams were able to achieve faster process development timelines and tackle more complex use cases with high business impact.

In addition to developing new processes, the interviewees’ organizations invested additional time to process changes by fine-tuning their initial development efforts to optimize business outcomes.

The IT manager in real estate described the development timeline for two projects for different offices: “[Process development] took a long time. It took us nine months to implement our ticketing engine in the Netherlands office. For our Germany office, it took one year to develop a full-suite property management system.”

The interviewee continued: “Right now, our goal is to get step one done within a single day. We are trying to shift the strategy from having several meetings and multiple iterations of feedback to building processes in a single session. We extend our usual meetings by 4 to 5 hours, and instead of talking about it, we actually build the first iteration of the product to begin using it. After a month, we have another session where we take all of the feedback [to] plan a better implementation of it, which can take maybe two to three weeks to do. After we ensure it’s solid and scalable, we let it settle for about a year before building a third iteration … that we roll out everywhere.”
The enterprise architect in technology said: “[Before using Camunda,] our business was getting impacted due to slowness of delivery because the iteration for rolling out the features was high. We tried to build a microservice type of approach, but it failed. So, we went with a no-code approach to directly involve business users.”

The same interviewee explained their organization’s in-depth internal process for ensuring successful adoption of Camunda across departments: “We have an innovation team dedicated to working on new tools to identify and create the playbook, do a proof of concept, work with the different business groups, identify the use cases, and pick complex types of use cases with the greatest impact. Then, the engineering team does the POCs (proofs of concept) within Camunda. After the POC is done, they do a demo to the right audience and gather feedback. Then, they build the first use case, productize it, and market it to other internal business groups like sales, marketing, customer support, and compliance. This allows different groups within our organization to start looking at the value proposition of the use cases on Camunda.”

They continued: “The process of developing processes for a small use case and hosting it in the cloud took three months’ time. We then identified the playbook for repetitive [processes] that needed to be built out by the different business groups.”
The head of IT standards in real estate said: “We started [using Camunda] in 2015 and initially picked one to four processes that needed to get automated, and [we] worked with our finance, authorization, and policy teams to develop them. We showed the teams how to create the processes, and they started to implement the first versions of those processes and improved them over time. It was a good idea to scale through a central digitization program.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

The composite organization’s average time to develop each new orchestrated process falls as it becomes more proficient with Camunda.¹¹
In addition to building new processes, the composite organization also expends development time to change existing processes already orchestrated with Camunda (as described in Benefit C: Development Efficiencies).
The composite’s developers and business analysts work together to build, change, and maintain processes. However, as the composite organization becomes more proficient with Camunda, its business analysts increasingly participate in process development. Because its business analysts earn less than its developers, the aggregate average hourly wage of process development team members falls from the initial period to Year 3. Thus, the composite’s process development becomes cheaper even as it develops and changes more processes.
The composite’s process development team grows from 34 FTEs in Year 1 to 71 FTEs in Year 3.

Process development at might involve 0 FTEs in Year 1, 0 FTEs in Year 2, and 0 FTEs in Year 3.

In addition, this particular cost is sensitive to changes to the following variables:

Average time to develop a new process.
Aggregate average hourly rate for business analysts and developers.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $23 million.

For , this cost might have a three-year, risk-adjusted PV of .

Process Development

Ref.	Metric	Source		Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
F1	Orchestrated processes	C2		2525	4545	8080	140140
F2	Incremental orchestrated processes	F1-F1PY		2525	2020	3535	6060
F3	Average time to develop a new process (hours)	CompositeComposite		3,4283,428	3,1493,149	2,7552,755	2,1652,165
F4	New process development time (hours)	F2*F3		85,70085,700	62,98062,980	96,42596,425	129,900129,900
F5	Development time spent on process changes for orchestrated processes (hours)	C2C3C7C2C3C7		5,2255,225	8,6408,640	13,44013,440	18,48018,480
F6	Aggregate average hourly wage for developers and business analysts (fully burdened)	C10		$58$58	$58$58	$53$53	$48$48
Ft	Process development	(F4+F5)*F6		$5,273,650$5,273,650	$4,153,960$4,153,960	$5,822,845$5,822,845	$7,122,240$7,122,240
	Risk adjustment	↑20%
Ftr	Process development (risk-adjusted)			$6,328,380$6,328,380	$4,984,752$4,984,752	$6,987,414$6,987,414	$8,546,688$8,546,688
Three-year total: $26,847,234$26,847,234			Three-year present value: $23,055,948$23,055,948

Training For New Camunda Users

Evidence and data. Interviewees reported that new Camunda users required between two weeks’ and two months’ worth of training to achieve full proficiency. They said that while developers and more tech-savvy business analysts experienced a flatter learning curve, Camunda has a user-friendly interface that integrated with users’ existing interfaces to enable smooth onboarding experiences, even for those with less experience with new technologies.

The IT architect in insurance explained their organization’s training strategy: “We have a training program consisting of five different courses on our central portal that takes one to two days per module. The courses include BPMN modeling, documentation of process applications, and DMN development and testing. We do those courses on an as-needed basis. Once we have the critical mass of people that have requested a specific course, we provide it. We also provide a confluence wiki with the information we teach that users can reference. For developers, we have a reference process where we do a reference implementation to teach them how to build a process with Camunda. We also have the documentation side of that reference process for business analysts that want to learn how to describe the process using one of our templates.”

The interviewee continued: “For developers that work on process application development, most are confident using Camunda after one or two months. After working in Camunda for one or two years, you are definitely considered an expert. This is especially true for developers, as there is a lot of coding involved in developing other applications.”
The head of IT standards in insurance explained: “All of our business domains use Camunda. We have about 1,000 people in IT, and quite a lot of them use Camunda. About 200 went through our internal Camunda Academy, so 20% of IT directly uses Camunda to develop process solutions. The rest of IT knows that our applications are running Camunda and has a rough understanding how it works, but doesn’t directly contribute to it. … “We have some junior developers who are part of the team, and they get a small task to implement within Camunda. So, they don’t run through our Camunda Academy since they just do a bit of coding.”
The senior manager in finance said, “Using our training recommendations, [our users] are able to self-learn in about two weeks’ time, and then they’re off to go.”

“The learning curve for Camunda is not very steep. It’s quite nice to get into it. Nowadays, when we get new employees from straight out of university, they already have BPMN experience, which makes it easier for them to get into the methodology because it’s become an industry standard for describing processes. That makes it a lot easier to get into modelling.”

IT architect, insurance

The IT manager in real estate described the learning curve for non-technical users: “We hired someone who had basically no knowledge of technology whatsoever. After six months, they were able to make back-end APIs and front-end user interfaces. So, I think the gold standard is that it takes six months to learn how to use Camunda if you know absolutely nothing. … Training is based on how quickly you can get people comfortable with the new process and how quickly you can get people confident that they are doing the right thing. … The quicker you can get people confident and knowledgeable, the better the end result will be. Camunda makes this process easier because it’s not hard to understand any of the stuff that we’re doing as long as we are communicating effectively.”

The interviewee continued: “We have the people on the development side who are working to integrate Camunda seamlessly into other areas of our stack. They really wanted to do this, and they’re really knowledgeable. In terms of training them, we facilitated a contact with Camunda and let them run with it on their own. They were really into it. Most companies require a back-end developer, a front-end developer, and a business user to create a digital product. [With] Camunda, we were able to combine these three discrete roles under the role of a product developer. As a result, our training became more comprehensive. Rather than focusing on teaching specific tasks, we now train our users to create digital products, which requires mastering Camunda to be able to work on both the back-end and front-end parts of executing processes.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

Twenty percent of the developers and business analysts who build processes undergo formal training on Camunda (e.g., they read documentation, complete tutorials, etc.) Some users pick up Camunda without training, and some learn Camunda informally from their colleagues.
New Camunda users at the composite organization become proficient with it after four weeks. However, during those four weeks, new users spend only 30% of their time formally learning Camunda.

At , 0 developers and business analysts might undergo formal training on Camunda initially. Then 0 developers and business analysts might undergo training in Year 1, 0 in Year 2, and Year 3.

Risks. Overall, the model is moderately sensitive to changes to any of the assumptions about the composite organization (e.g., number of processes, percentage of processes orchestrated with Camunda, etc.). In addition, this cost is sensitive to changes to the percentage of developers and business analysts who undergo training. This value could vary from organization to organization for a variety of reasons.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $92,000.

For , this cost might have a three-year, risk-adjusted PV of .

Training For New Camunda Users

Ref.	Metric	Source		Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
G1	New process development time (hours)	F4		85,70085,700	62,98062,980	96,42596,425	129,900129,900
G2	Developers and business analysts who develop new processes	G1/2,080		4141	3030	4646	6262
G3	Percentage of developers and business analysts who undergo training	InterviewsInterviews		20%20%	20%20%	20%20%	20%20%
G4	Developers and business analysts who undergo training	G3*G4		99	66	1010	1313
G5	Training time for a new Camunda user (weeks)	InterviewsInterviews		44	44	44	44
G6	Percentage of time spent on Camunda training	InterviewsInterviews		30%30%	30%30%	30%30%	30%30%
G7	Training time for a new Camunda user (hours)	G540G6		4848	4848	4848	4848
G8	Aggregate average hourly wage for developers and business analysts (fully burdened)	C10		$58$58	$58$58	$53$53	$48$48
Gt	Training for new Camunda users	G4G7G8		$25,056$25,056	$16,704$16,704	$25,440$25,440	$29,952$29,952
	Risk adjustment	↑10%
Gtr	Training for new Camunda users (risk-adjusted)			$27,562$27,562	$18,374$18,374	$27,984$27,984	$32,947$32,947
Three-year total: $106,867$106,867			Three-year present value: $92,147$92,147

Platform Administration

Evidence and data. Each interviewee said their organization created a central team (e.g., center of excellence) to coordinate and support Camunda usage. These teams had multiple responsibilities: enablement and support (i.e., making it easier for other departments and business units to adopt Camunda for process automation), platform maintenance and oversight (e.g., updating the organization’s Camunda instances as needed), and performing other tasks unrelated to Camunda.

The enterprise architect in technology explained: “We have six team members who provide 24/7 support for our entire tech stack, which includes Camunda. … Each business group has one assigned architect. Some groups might have two to three different transformational programs going on and require additional architects, depending on the execution roadmap that is created in the pipeline. We also take into account the number of integrations that need to be built out as well as the complexity and timeline of the projects. In the beginning, we had about 13 software engineers for our transformation journey. Beyond that, there are many other teams and engineers implementing their own use cases.”

They continued: “We also built process APIs outside of Camunda, but the orchestration ultimately plugs into Camunda. To do that, we assigned team members to pick an activity and schedule their sprint timeframes. Roughly 50% of team members worked on Camunda, and 50% worked on building the APIs.”

The interviewee concluded: “The platform team role involves working directly with the past platform account managers to build our roadmap. We evaluate how the platform needs to evolve to suit our needs and investigate new features coming from Camunda to determine our strategy. The platform team also builds the right monitoring platforms, dashboards, and common libraries that are used by different business groups. This includes our logging framework, connectivity library, and custom connectors. [Finally,] the team builds a decision framework for the integration to educate our business users on how to go through the decision-making process of determining the best situations to use Camunda.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

The composite organization creates a small central team to support process orchestration across the organization. The team consists of nine IT employees, which is based on the total number of developers and business analysts who participate in process development.

At , the central team to support process orchestration across the organization might have 0 IT employees.

Team members spend 15% of their time supporting and enabling Camunda users (e.g., answering questions, writing documentation, and creating templates and reusable components within Camunda itself).
The composite’s team members spend between 5% and 28% of their time managing the Camunda instance (e.g., administering an on-premises installation). This time commitment increases proportionately as the organization orchestrates more processes.

At , team members spend 0 hours on platform administration initially, 0 hours in Year 1, 0 hours in Year 2, and 0 hours in Year 3.

In addition, this particular cost is sensitive to changes to the following variables:

Team size.
Percentage of time spent on user enablement and support.
Percentage of time spent on platform management. This percentage may be smaller if the organization uses Camunda in the cloud rather than on-premises.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $1.1 million.

For , this cost might have a three-year, risk-adjusted PV of .

Platform Administration

Ref.	Metric	Source		Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
H1	Team members	G2Y0*20%		99	99	99	99
H2	Percentage of time spent on user enablement and support	InterviewsInterviews		15%15%	15%15%	15%15%	15%15%
H3	Percentage of time spent on platform management	H3Y0/R15Y0H3H3Y0/R15Y0H3		5%5%	9%9%	16%16%	28%28%
H4	Total administration time (hours)	H12,080(H2+H3)		3,7443,744	4,4934,493	5,8035,803	8,0508,050
H5	Aggregate average hourly wage for developers and business analysts (fully burdened)	C10		$58$58	$58$58	$53$53	$48$48
Ht	Platform administration	H4*H5		$217,152$217,152	$260,594$260,594	$307,559$307,559	$386,400$386,400
	Risk adjustment	↑10%
Htr	Platform administration (risk-adjusted)			$238,867$238,867	$286,653$286,653	$338,315$338,315	$425,040$425,040
Three-year total: $1,288,876$1,288,876			Three-year present value: $1,098,399$1,098,399

Employee Retraining/Change Management

Evidence and data. The interviewees’ organizations incurred light costs to retrain employees when processes changed. As processes went from being manual to orchestrated with Camunda, end-user employees had to learn new workflows and tools. The interviewees viewed these costs as relatively minor.

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

Initially, several hundred employees perform the orchestrated processes for the composite organization. Even though the processes are mostly automated, some tasks still require human intervention. As the composite organization orchestrates more processes with Camunda, the number of employees who perform orchestrated processes grows.
As new processes become orchestrated, the employees who perform those processes must be retrained. On average, each employee requires a maximum of 5 hours of retraining. This time accounts for both focused training as well as other costs associated with change (e.g., initial mistakes as employees become accustomed to new processes, etc.).

At , 0 might require retraining initially. Then 0 employees might require retraining in Year 1, 0 in Year 2, and 0 in Year 3.

In addition, this cost is slightly sensitive to changes to retraining time per employee.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $486,000.

For , this cost might have a three-year, risk-adjusted PV of .

Employee Retraining/Change Management

Ref.	Metric	Source		Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
I1	Orchestrated processes	C2		2525	4545	8080	140140
I2	Average instances per process	R9		328,000328,000	328,000328,000	328,000328,000	328,000328,000
I3	Employee time to perform orchestrated processes (hours)	I1I2B9		1,394,0001,394,000	2,214,0002,214,000	3,148,8003,148,800	4,592,0004,592,000
I4	Employees who perform orchestrated processes	I3/2,080		671671	1,0651,065	1,5141,514	2,2082,208
I5	Employees who require retraining	I4-I4PY		671671	394394	449449	694694
I6	Retraining time per employee (hours)	G7*10%		55	55	55	55
I7	Average employee hourly wage (fully burdened)	R7		$46$46	$46$46	$46$46	$46$46
It	Employee retraining/change management	I5I6I7		$154,330$154,330	$90,620$90,620	$103,270$103,270	$159,620$159,620
	Risk adjustment	↑10%
Itr	Employee retraining/change management (risk-adjusted)			$169,763$169,763	$99,682$99,682	$113,597$113,597	$175,582$175,582
Three-year total: $558,624$558,624			Three-year present value: $486,182$486,182

Consolidated Three-Year Risk-Adjusted Metrics

Cash Flow Chart (Risk-Adjusted)

Total costs Total benefits Cumulative net benefits

The financial results calculated in the Benefits and Costs sections can be used to determine the ROI, NPV, and payback period for the composite organization’s investment. Forrester assumes a yearly discount rate of 10% for this analysis.

These risk-adjusted ROI, NPV, and payback period values are determined by applying risk-adjustment factors to the unadjusted results in each Benefit and Cost section.

Cash Flow Analysis (Risk-Adjusted Estimates)

	Initial	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Total	Present Value
Total costs	($7,004,572)($7,004,572)	($5,869,462)($5,869,462)	($8,427,310)($8,427,310)	($10,860,257)($10,860,257)	($32,161,601)($32,161,601)	($27,464,637)($27,464,637)
Total benefits	$0$0	$17,673,289$17,673,289	$48,342,450$48,342,450	$111,158,117$111,158,117	$177,173,857$177,173,857	$139,533,804$139,533,804
Net benefits	($7,004,572)($7,004,572)	$11,803,827$11,803,827	$39,915,140$39,915,140	$100,297,860$100,297,860	$145,012,256$145,012,256	$112,069,167$112,069,167
ROI						408%408%
Payback						8 months8 months

Appendix A: Total Economic Impact

Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes and assists vendors in communicating the value proposition of their products and services to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of IT initiatives to both senior management and other key business stakeholders.

Total Economic Impact Approach

Benefits represent the value delivered to the business by the product. The TEI methodology places equal weight on the measure of benefits and the measure of costs, allowing for a full examination of the effect of the technology on the entire organization.
Costs consider all expenses necessary to deliver the proposed value, or benefits, of the product. The cost category within TEI captures incremental costs over the existing environment for ongoing costs associated with the solution.
Flexibility represents the strategic value that can be obtained for some future additional investment building on top of the initial investment already made. Having the ability to capture that benefit has a PV that can be estimated.
Risks measure the uncertainty of benefit and cost estimates given: 1) the likelihood that estimates will meet original projections and 2) the likelihood that estimates will be tracked over time. TEI risk factors are based on “triangular distribution.”

PRESENT VALUE (PV)

The present or current value of (discounted) cost and benefit estimates given at an interest rate (the discount rate). The PV of costs and benefits feed into the total NPV of cash flows.
NET PRESENT VALUE (NPV)

The present or current value of (discounted) future net cash flows given an interest rate (the discount rate). A positive project NPV normally indicates that the investment should be made unless other projects have higher NPVs.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)

A project’s expected return in percentage terms. ROI is calculated by dividing net benefits (benefits less costs) by costs.
DISCOUNT RATE

The interest rate used in cash flow analysis to take into account the time value of money. Organizations typically use discount rates between 8% and 16%.
PAYBACK PERIOD

The breakeven point for an investment. This is the point in time at which net benefits (benefits minus costs) equal initial investment or cost.

The initial investment column contains costs incurred at “time 0” or at the beginning of Year 1 that are not discounted. All other cash flows are discounted using the discount rate at the end of the year. PV calculations are calculated for each total cost and benefit estimate. NPV calculations in the summary tables are the sum of the initial investment and the discounted cash flows in each year. Sums and present value calculations of the Total Benefits, Total Costs, and Cash Flow tables may not exactly add up, as some rounding may occur.

Appendix B: Supplemental Material

Related Forrester Research

“Design A Future-Proof Process Automation Technology Fabric,” Forrester Research, Inc., January 23, 2023.

“Use 10 Criteria To Choose Your Process Automation Platform,” Forrester Research, Inc., June 2, 2023.

Appendix C: Endnotes

¹ Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes and assists vendors in communicating the value proposition of their products and services to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of IT initiatives to both senior management and other key business stakeholders.

² Forrester assumes process instances follow a normal distribution: 68% of processes (340 processes) occur 100,000 times per year, 27% of processes (135 processes) occur 500,000 times per year, and 5% of processes (25 processes) occur 2,500,000 times per year. In total, the composite organization sees 164 million process instances per year, and the weighted average number of instances per process per year is 328,000.

³ Source: “Margins by Sector (US),” New York University Stern School of Business, January 2023.

⁴ Forrester assumes external process instances per customer follows a normal distribution: One external process instance serves one customer 68% of the time, two external process instances serve one customer 27% of the time, and four external process instances serve one customer 5% of the time. According to this distribution, 82% of customers interact with external processes once per year, 16% of customers interact with external processes twice per year, and 2% of customers interact with external processes four times per year. In total, the composite organization has around 66 million instances of external processes per year and 55 million customers served. This yields an average of 1.2 external process instances per customer.

⁵ Forrester assumes revenues per customer are approximately normally distributed and Pareto efficient: 95% of customers account for 20% of revenues (these customers have an average revenue per customer of $96) and 5% of customers account for 80% of revenues. These customers have an average revenue per customer of $7,273. The composite organization’s average revenue per customer is $455. However, the processes orchestrated with Camunda retain slightly more higher-value customers (e.g., customers who are upsold, purchase additional services, etc.). Forrester assumes 93% of the composite’s retained incremental customers are lower-value customers and 7% are higher-value customers. Because the incremental customers retained includes more higher-value customers than customer base as a whole, they have a slightly higher average revenue per customer of $600.

⁶ Forrester assumes manual process instance completion times follow a normal distribution: 68% of process instances take 0.08 hours or 5 minutes to complete manually, 27% take 0.4 hours or 24 minutes to complete manually, 3% take two hours to complete manually; and 2% take 10 hours to complete manually. The composite needs nearly 20,000 employees to complete all internal process instances manually. Each spends 38% of their time on processes that take less than 1 hour to complete and 62% of their time on process instances that take 2 hours or more. Thus, the majority of employee time is spent on time-consuming processes even though they are the minority of total process instances. With this distribution, the weighted average time for the composite organization to manually complete a process instance is 0.4 hours.

⁷ The average fully burdened employee salary at the composite organization is $96,000 per year. Forrester assumes salaries at the composite organization follow a normal distribution: 68% of employees earn fully burdened annual salaries of $80,000 or less, 27% earn salaries of around $120,000, and 5% earn salaries of $180,000 or more. This distribution is in line with average salary data for private sector workers in industries such as insurance, finance, etc. Total payroll at the composite organization is $5.748 billion. Source: “Employer Costs for Employees Compensation Summary,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics press release, December 15, 2023.

⁸ Forrester assumes the composite organization’s distribution of process changes is approximately normal: 68% of its processes change once every two years and 32% change twice per year.

⁹ Forrester assumes developers earn an annual fully burdened salary of $120,000 and business analysts earn an annual fully burdened salary of $80,000. Forrester also assumes developers handle all process development work in Year 1, developers perform 75% of this work in Year 2 while business analysts handle 25%, and developers perform 50% of this work in Year 3 while business analysts handle 50%. Thus, as business analysts do more process development work, the aggregate average hourly rate of team members who develop and change processes falls from $58 in Year 1 (when the team is comprised entirely by developers) to $48 in Year 3 (when the team is comprised half by developers and half by business analysts).

¹⁰ Forrester assumes that the costs of process errors follow a normal distribution: 68% of process errors cost $18 (calculated by multiplying the average time to perform a non-orchestrated process instance with the average employee hourly wage), 27% of process errors cost $180 (e.g., when employees spend additional time troubleshooting and fixing issues that are trickier than usual); 3% of errors cost $1,800, and 2% of errors cost $18,000 due to fines for violating regulations. With this distribution, process errors cost the composite organization more than $63.3 million annually. Even though 95% of the process errors entail rework only, more than 87% of the composite’s costs come from regulatory violations. This distribution yields a weighted average cost per error of $475 for the composite organization.

¹¹ Forrester assumes the average time for the composite organization to change processes is typically 20% of the average time to develop new processes. For example, when changing a process takes 209 hours, it requires 1,045 hours to develop most new processes. Forrester also assumes that in each year, new process development times are normally distributed. For example, during the initial period, 68% of processes take 1,045 hours to develop, 27% take 5,225 hours, and 5% take 26,125 hours. This is how Forrester determined the values for F3.

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© Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies.

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Customize These Results

Customize These Results

Executive Summary

Key Findings

Table Of Contents

Key Statistics

408%408%

$139.5M$139.5M

$112.1M$112.1M

8 months8 months

Benefits (Three-Year)

TEI Framework And Methodology

Due Diligence

Interviews

Composite Organization

Financial Model Framework

Case Study

Disclosures

The Camunda Customer Journey

Drivers leading to the Camunda investment

Interviews

Camunda Deployments For Interviewees’ Organizations

Key Challenges

Investment Objectives

Composite Organization

Key Assumptions

Composite Organization

Analysis Of Benefits

Quantified benefit data as applied to the composite

Total Benefits

Customer Satisfaction

Customer Satisfaction

Operations Efficiencies

Operations Efficiencies

Development Efficiencies

Development Efficiencies

Process Quality

Process Quality

Unquantified Benefits

Flexibility

Analysis Of Costs

Quantified cost data as applied to the composite

Total Costs

Camunda Costs

Camunda Costs

Process Development

Process Development

Training For New Camunda Users

Training For New Camunda Users

Platform Administration

Platform Administration

Employee Retraining/Change Management

Employee Retraining/Change Management

Financial Summary

Consolidated Three-Year Risk-Adjusted Metrics

Cash Flow Chart (Risk-Adjusted)

Cash Flow Analysis (Risk-Adjusted Estimates)

Appendixes

Appendix A: Total Economic Impact

Total Economic Impact Approach

PRESENT VALUE (PV)

NET PRESENT VALUE (NPV)

RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)

DISCOUNT RATE

PAYBACK PERIOD

Appendix B: Supplemental Material

Appendix C: Endnotes

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