What exactly is a BPM platform?
Business Process Management is the discipline of modelling, executing, measuring and improving business processes. A BPM platform is the technical stack you use to do that: a modeller (BPMN editor), a process engine that executes the models, a task inbox for users, a decision rules component (DMN), and monitoring. It is not a workflow tool for a single team; it is a platform for your entire organisation, on which dozens of processes run in a uniform way.
What is the difference between BPMN and DMN?
BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) describes the flow: start, tasks, gateways, end events. DMN (Decision Model and Notation) describes decision rules: given this input, what is the outcome? In practice, a BPMN process calls a DMN table at the right moment and uses the outcome to route onward. By putting decision rules in DMN, your business team can adjust them without the process model itself changing, a significant productivity gain.
Do you replace Camunda or build on top of it?
Almost always we build on top of it. Camunda and Flowable are open-source process engines that thousands of organisations worldwide have tested, so building our own variant would be unwise. What we add is a UI that fits your brand, integrations with your core systems, a release pipeline with BPMN validation, audit reporting, and the process-specific logic that no standard engine provides out of the box. This way you keep the scale and stability of a proven engine, and the freedom of a custom platform.
Open-source BPM or a commercial platform?
For the vast majority of our clients, open-source (Camunda Platform or Flowable, both with optional enterprise editions) is the right choice. You keep control of the stack, avoid heavy licensing, and can later move to your own team or a different partner if needed. Commercial platforms such as Pegasystems, Appian or IBM BAW are relevant in specific enterprise niches with existing contracts, but they more often lead to vendor lock-in and are harder to combine with cloud-native custom development. We always advise based on your situation, not on a preference by default.
What is the difference between low-code BPM and custom BPM?
Low-code BPM platforms, such as Appian, Microsoft Power Automate or ServiceNow Workflow, let you build processes visually with limited coding knowledge. For simple approval flows, that is often fine. The limits show up with integrations, performance, multi-tenancy and complex exception handling. There, low-code platforms hit architectural boundaries or push you into expensive licensing models per action or per user. With custom development on an open-source engine, those limits sit much further away, with a higher initial investment but more room to scale.
Can we maintain processes ourselves later on?
Yes, that is an explicit goal in every project. BPMN models are readable for business analysts and your own developers, DMN tables are designed to be managed by domain experts, and the release pipeline we set up gives your team the means to take processes safely into production. We train process owners and developers, deliver documentation, and remain available for tricky matters, but without making us a single point of failure.
What determines the cost of a BPM project?
The number of processes in scope and their complexity, how many integrations with existing systems are needed, the extent to which you operate in a regulated sector (compliance and audit requirements carry weight), whether a legacy BPM migration is involved, and how much support your own team needs during knowledge transfer. We work with fixed sprint budgets per phase that you can steer on. We do not offer a fixed total for a multi-year project, because that would be false certainty for both you and us.
How does a BPM platform fit within our existing IT?
A BPM platform usually sits between your front-end systems (portals, mobile apps, case access) and your back-end systems (ERP, CRM, HR suite, document management). It calls them via APIs, schedules tasks in your existing inbox environment or in its own task inbox, and sends audit events to your central logging stack. Our experience with
smart API integrations and
enterprise software is directly relevant here, because the success of a BPM platform stands or falls with how robust those integrations are.