Vodafone: Boosting Agility, Transparency and Scalability with Camunda

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

• Telecommunications

• Business Operation
• Sales & Marketing

• Predictive Maintenance
• Process Control & Optimization
• Supply Chain Visibility

• Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
• System Integration

Vodafone Germany faced several issues with its OTELO and branded reseller IT system. The system ran a vast number of different services, supporting an array of customer-facing channels – from campaigns and product offers to POS. However, it was impossible to separate the channels and, without an effective API layer in the infrastructure, Vodafone couldn’t establish an important online partner channel that was urgently required within its branded reseller and second brand segments. This legacy services technology wasn’t just ineffective to use and difficult to maintain, it created high maintenance and operating costs, a slow time-to-market for new products and an inconsistent customer experience. Vodafone needed to develop a truly agile, transparent and scalable approach. But with processes distributed everywhere imaginable within its system landscape, Vodafone needed to discover where its processes were and how they were performing, before it could migrate to a modern cloud-based infrastructure.

Vodafone Germany is the largest national company in the Vodafone Group – one of the largest telecommunications groups in the world. In fact, every second German is a Vodafone customer, with 49.6 million mobile phone cards, almost 11 million broadband and 14 million television customers. Vodafone employees 16,000 people in Germany and generates revenues of almost 13 billion euros. The company's OTELO and branded reseller IT system ran a vast number of different services, supporting an array of customer-facing channels – from campaigns and product offers to POS.

Vodafone used Camunda to transform from multiple monoliths to a cloud-based infrastructure. They built an intelligent proxy layer around its existing middleware and UI backend, quickly analyzed communications and identified and captured events. Each process was documented using the Camunda Modeler, creating a visual map of processes that was easily understood by both business and IT. Through this discovery phase, Vodafone identified many tasks within workflows that were completely hidden and left few or no communications traces within the existing processes. Using a combination of expert knowledge and available communications traces, Vodafone was able to reverse-engineer processes in areas where tasks were unclear. By bringing documentation to life through Camunda BPM, Vodafone gained instantaneous insight and transparency into its processes and was able to optimize and recreate processes entirely in a new cloud-based framework, that runs on AWS with Camunda orchestrating across all channels and backend services.

• The machine-to-machine response time of Vodafone’s systems has improved by 40% as a result of process optimization and introduction of intelligent caching mechanisms.
• Performance insights through continuous process monitoring and improvement enable constant fine-tuning, so processes are always running at optimum.
• The complete customer lifecycle (sales, service, retention) has been automated and optimized, leading to significant time savings in customer service – freeing staff to concentrate on customers and value-added activities.

• Demonstrated a minimum viable product within three months
• First go-live came after just five months
• Machine-to-machine response time improved by 40%