Business process management platforms are rarely built from scratch — the ecosystem offers mature engines like Camunda, Flowable, and Activiti. Yet there is a recurring gap in the ecosystem: the engines are powerful, but the surrounding tooling — form design, process versioning, multi-tenant deployment, and operational monitoring — consistently required custom development. DekaFlow is our answer to that gap.
Why We Built Our Own Platform
Enterprise clients — from insurance groups to mid-market logistics companies — need to automate approval workflows, onboarding processes, and compliance checklists. Each time, teams assemble the same constellation of tools: Camunda for the BPMN engine, a custom form renderer, an admin UI, and bespoke deployment scripts. After repeated projects, the pattern becomes obvious: teams rebuild infrastructure instead of delivering business value.
DekaFlow was conceived as a productized layer over Camunda's process engine — a platform that our team deploys once and that clients configure, not code.
Architecture Decisions
The core design principle is API-first and multi-tenant. Every function in DekaFlow is accessible via a versioned REST API, enabling integration with client systems regardless of their technology stack. Multi-tenancy is enforced at the database schema level: each tenant operates in an isolated schema with no shared process state, making the platform suitable for SaaS deployment as well as on-premise installation within client infrastructure.
Camunda 8 serves as the BPMN execution engine. We chose Camunda because of its separation between the process engine and the modeler, its mature Java SDK, and its strong support for long-running processes — essential for insurance claims workflows that may span weeks. Zeebe, Camunda's distributed workflow engine, provides horizontal scalability without a single point of failure.
Form Designer
One of the highest-friction points in any BPM project is form development. DekaFlow includes a drag-and-drop form designer that outputs JSON Schema-compatible form definitions. Forms support conditional field visibility, server-side validation rules, file attachment handling, and digital signature capture. Non-technical process owners can design and publish forms without engineering involvement — reducing change lead time from weeks to hours.
Process Versioning and Rollback
In regulated industries, process changes must be auditable. DekaFlow maintains a full version history of every BPMN process and form definition. Running instances always execute against the version that was active when they were started; new instances pick up the latest published version. Emergency rollbacks are available via the admin console in under two minutes, with automatic audit log entries for compliance purposes.
DekaFlow is designed to reduce the time to automate a new approval workflow from weeks of custom development to days of configuration, enabling organizations to manage dozens of active process definitions and thousands of daily task completions.
Deployment to Customer Environments
DekaFlow supports three deployment topologies:
- Managed SaaS — Hosted on Deka's Azure infrastructure, SOC 2 Type II compliant, with EU data residency
- Customer-hosted cloud — Helm charts for Kubernetes deployment on client's Azure, AWS, or on-premise clusters
- Air-gapped on-premise — For clients with strict network isolation requirements, full deployment in a private data center with no outbound internet dependency
Operational monitoring is built in: Prometheus metrics are exposed by default, Grafana dashboards ship with the platform, and alerting rules cover process SLA breaches, engine queue depth, and form submission error rates.
What's Next
The current roadmap includes a low-code decision table editor (DMN), an AI-assisted process discovery module that analyzes email and ticket data to propose automatable workflows, and pre-built connectors for SAP, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics. DekaFlow is available to Deka Technology clients as part of our BPM practice engagements.
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