Success story
Executive Summary
Hessischer Rundfunk (known as hr), the public broadcasting corporation for the German state of Hesse and a member of ARD, the consortium of Germany’s public broadcasters, had to renew a deprecated, largely manual system for coordinating content from technical acceptance through distribution and archiving
Rising content volumes across growing distribution channels meant the existing process could no longer keep pace without adding headcount
hr implemented Flowable as the workflow orchestration layer connecting editorial, technical acceptance, file desk, and archive teams in a single, governed case management process
The platform connects directly to hr’s program planning systems to pre-fill order forms with existing metadata, and gives each department its own view into a shared, transparently tracked process
The solution delivered a 33% increase in processing capacity, roughly 1,500 hours saved per year across 5,000 to 6,000 orders, and absorbed the equivalent of two full-time roles’ worth of demand without new hires
What started as a single workflow renewal has since become hr’s standard model for operational process design, with two further workflows already in scope
Hessischer Rundfunk is the public broadcasting corporation for the German state of Hesse, headquartered in Frankfurt. Within the organization, every piece of content produced across radio, television, and digital channels must pass technical acceptance before reaching its destination, whether that is a broadcast channel, a co-production partner, a sign language service, or the archive.
That journey involves multiple departments, each responsible for a distinct stage, and each dependent on the others moving reliably. For years, the system coordinating that handoff had grown into a patchwork of tools, manual workarounds, and informal communication. Kai Ebers, IT Architect at Hessischer Rundfunk, described the environment plainly: “We had quite disrupted communication in every manner you can imagine.”
As distribution channels multiplied and content volumes grew, that combination of fragmented systems and manual coordination was no longer sustainable. Benjamin Voss, Product Owner of QDA (Quality Assurance, Distribution and Archiving) at hr, summed up the core problem: “The increasing volume of content that needs to pass through this business process could not be handled by the team anymore without adding more human resources.” The organization needed a way to absorb significantly more work without growing the team that did it.
The root of the problem wasn’t any single broken tool. The deeper issue was that editorial, technical acceptance, and archive teams each operated in their own silo, with no shared system connecting their work. When the editorial team commissioned a piece of content, it effectively disappeared into the process. “We needed to call them to know what was going on,” Kai explained. The system sent a single status update once a case was fully closed, but nothing in between.
Coordination ran through emails, phone calls, paper lists inside the technical department, and a self-built Access-based tool that IT no longer maintained. Every order required staff to manually copy and paste content metadata between systems, a task that scaled directly with volume and added no value beyond keeping the process moving. None of this was a sustainable foundation for a growing organization.
The mandate from media production was explicit: find a way to mitigate rising demand without increasing headcount. That constraint ruled out simply hiring people, or adding resources, and made a genuine process solution the only viable path.
hr needed a platform that could bring previously siloed departments into a single connected process, make the status of every order visible to everyone in real time, and eliminate the manual coordination that had come to define how the team operated.
The media production department brought hr’s IT department in early to lead the renewal. IT already had years of experience running automated workflows on Flowable for other business processes. That track record made reliability the starting point for evaluation rather than a checklist of features. “We were confident about the reliability of the system, and that was really one of the points we are looking for,” Kai said. Involving stakeholders early helped ensure the solution met their needs and built trust in the process.
What we liked most was that you could see how you created the workflow and what is going on.
Kai Ebers, IT Architect, Hessischer Rundfunk
What ultimately set Flowable apart was its ability to combine graphical process visibility with genuine flexibility for manual, human-in-the-loop work.
The hr process was not a simple linear workflow. Each order carried its own context, metadata, departmental tasks, and status changes, and involved multiple teams making decisions at different stages. That made case management a better fit than a rigid step-by-step process, and Flowable’s approach to modeling that kind of work was something the team could also show non-technical stakeholders.
Rather than building separate systems for each department, hr modeled one shared case management process in Flowable, then gave each team a view of the work that matched its role.
Editorial teams initiate a case by filling out an order form.
Technical staff see only the tasks the system assigns to them at each stage.
Archive teams receive their own tasks when the process reaches them.
Everyone works from the same underlying case, with full visibility into its current state, but without needing to navigate anyone else’s part of the process. Real-time status updates also foster a sense of control and transparency, empowering teams to work more efficiently and confidently.
In addition, Flowable connects directly to hr’s program planning systems, pulling existing data straight into pre-filled order forms before an editorial team member has typed a single character. “We’re using that data to pre-fill the order form when the editorial department’s commissioning the technical acceptance,” Kai said. That change eliminated the manual copy-paste work that had consumed staff time on every order and improved the consistency of metadata as it moved through the system.
Before any of this was built, hr’s team mapped the process visually with each department using a technique called domain storytelling: simple, icon-based diagrams that gave editorial, technical, and archive teams a shared picture of how work moved between them. That investment in shared understanding before implementation meant that every department arrived at the Flowable workflow design already familiar with the logic.
hr also needed to meet specific accessibility conformance requirements for the interface. The volume of manual tasks in the process made a high-quality, accessible graphical interface essential, something the team’s earlier fully automated, behind the scenes implementations had never required.
Since implementing Flowable, hr’s processing capacity has increased by approximately 33%, handling significantly more orders with the same team that was previously struggling to keep pace.
The numbers behind that shift are substantial. The 5,000 to 6,000 orders the workflow processes each year used to require, in Benjamin’s words, “a minimum of two, three, maybe even five calls, and three emails” per product. That coordination now runs through the platform itself. “As a result, the efficiency of information flow has increased by approximately 95%,” Benjamin said.
Across the full volume of orders, the team estimates saving roughly 1,500 hours per year, with the realistic potential to extend that to around 1,200 additional hours annually through deeper system integration.
The most consequential number, though, may be the simplest. Despite a meaningful increase in workload, hr absorbed the equivalent of two full-time roles’ worth of additional demand without adding additional employees or contractors. That was the founding goal behind the project, and it is the outcome the team points to first.
The operational gains matter, but so does what changed between teams. Editorial, technical acceptance, and archive departments, previously three siloed functions working through indirect, ad hoc communication, now operate inside one shared system in real time.
The shift also tells a story about what happens when a single successful implementation earns organizational trust. What began as a renewal of one deprecated workflow has since become hr’s standard model for how it thinks about and builds operational processes. Every new workflow hr considers now starts from the same foundation.
Asked to describe how users responded when they first encountered the platform, Kai relayed what he had heard directly: “The first time the users saw the platform, they said it was mind-blowing.” That reaction, and the adoption that followed, confirm something beyond the efficiency numbers. Flowable did not just replace a broken process, but gave hr a new way to coordinate work at scale, and one the organization has chosen to build on.
Hessischer Rundfunk’s experience offers a clear template for any organization trying to scale operational capacity without proportionally scaling headcount.
Choose case management when work is more ad hoc: When a process involves multiple departments, frequent status changes, manual decisions, and role-specific tasks, a governed case management model handles the complexity that a rigid sequential workflow cannot.
Build visibility from day one: Real-time status tracking removes the single biggest source of friction, the need to interrupt someone else’s work to find out progress and status.
Bring non-technical stakeholders into the design process early: Visual, plain-language process mapping before any system is built ensures that every department understands and trusts the workflow they will use.
Integrate at the data layer, not just the interface: Connecting to existing metadata systems eliminates manual rework at the source rather than simply making it faster.
Let proven reliability guide platform selection: hr’s prior experience running Flowable for other automated processes gave the team confidence in its reliability before a single requirement around interface or pricing was even discussed.
For organizations facing growing operational demand without a corresponding budget for headcount, hr’s experience shows that the constraint can become the catalyst. A connected, transparent workflow does not just make existing work faster. It changes how much an existing team can take on, and how confidently they can take it on.
