I’ve been hearing a lot about templates accelerating BPM migrations. The pitch is clean: instead of building workflows from scratch, you grab a pre-built template, customize it to your specific process, and you’re live faster.
The thing is, I’ve seen teams grab templates for other things—workflow automation, data pipelines, whatever—and every single time, it ends up being less “grab and go” and more “grab and redesign.” The template usually covers 60-70% of what you need. The last 30% requires rework because your process is subtly different from what the template assumed.
My question is whether migration templates are actually different. Are they flexible enough that you can genuinely customize them for different company structures and processes? Or does every team end up modifying them so heavily that the time saved building ends up getting spent redesigning?
The other part I’m trying to figure out: how battle-tested do these templates actually need to be? If fifty companies have used a template for migrating from Camunda to an open-source stack, and they all customized it, are you getting fifty variations or fifty essentially identical deployments with cosmetic changes?
Has anyone actually measured the time difference between “start from a template and customize” versus “build from scratch” for a real migration? What was the actual savings?