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General Services Administration

The General Services Administration (GSA) is an independent agency of the United States government established in 1949 to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies. The GSA supplies products and communications for U.S. government offices, provides transportation and office space to federal employees, and develops government-wide cost-minimizing policies, and other management tasks.

Business Problem

The GSA sought an application platform to modernize operations across core areas within the agency. They wanted a platform with strong BPM capabilities, as their focus was on both innovation and efficiency.

Appian Solution

The GSA has utilized Appian Cloud to support a hybrid-cloud approach that delivers cloud efficiencies, while integrating with data mandated to remain behind the firewall. GSA Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) uses Appian Cloud for Acquisition Planning. Prior to Appian, GSA FAS had no visibility into the status of the FAR-compliant acquisition plans in the pipeline. Acquisition plans were created inconsistently across the department and little information could be shared between planners. The Appian solution allows for 100% of the acquisition plan to be created in Appian, providing complete visibility into the completion status of acquisition plans. The solution also automates reviews and approvals for 11 different approval chains.

The GSA Public Building Service (PBS) has deployed the Appian-based GSA Real Estate Exchange (G-REX) solution to modernize Federal lease procurement through “Smart Leasing.” The transformative solution was developed and deployed in less than 18 months, on-time and on-budget. “Smart Leasing” is predicated on increasing efficiency and consistency while utilizing enterprise data for better business decisions. G-REX leverages Appian’s agility for continuous process improvement, mobility, social collaboration and data integration. The G-REX solution optimizes and accelerates the agency’s performance across 9,624 assets and an inventory of 370.2 million square feet of workspace used by more than one million federal employees work in spaces.

GSA PBS has also deployed a modern and flexible Procurement Request Module (PRM) application on Appian. The PRM application is the first milestone in a larger vision to transform procurement processes across GSA PBS. The complete system, called “Electronic Acquisition System Integrated” (EASi), will accelerate and modernize the end-to-end procurement process, from initial request through solicitations and contract writing, administration and close-out. Through a simple social interface, the PRM application enables smarter decisions and faster action for internal and external PBS users in the request, review, approval and initiation of goods and services procurement. The application leverages Appian Records’ enterprise-wide data management capabilities, as data integration is central to GSA PBS’ vision for improved procurement case management. PRM is integrated with GSA FAS’ Appian-based Acquisition Planning Wizard.