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Appian World 2012 Panel: Mobile, Cloud, and Social BPM

Alena Davis, Appian
April 16, 2012

Appian World 2012 features several customer and partner panel discussions, which are always a great source of information. Today's discussion offered the change to see how a wide range of companies use mobile, cloud, and social in their BPM implementations. Daryl Plummer of Gartner moderated the panel, which featured Melodie Holmes from Manulife Financial, Dion Beuckman from Enterprise Holdings, Dave Woods from SNL Financial, and John Russell from IBENOX.

Manulife is a leading Canadian financial-services company operating in over 20 countries worldwide. Melodie Holmes explained Manulife's use of 3 distinct Appian Cloud BPM instances in their Canadian division. She provided screen shots of their marketing services automation portal, which shows active tasks, common processes, documents, etc, and their Tempo feed, which aggregates news into one event stream for easy viewing. She said "I am definitely not a programmer," so she appreciated the ease of use of Appian BPM software across mobile devices and in the Cloud.

Enterprise Holdings is the largest car rental provider in the world, and operates the Alamo, Enterprise, and National brands. They've been an Appian customer since 2007. Dion Beuckman talked about Enterprise's new project based in the Cloud -- building an Appian-based operating system for their growing Enterprise Rideshare business line, which provides a commute solution for groups of people who live and work near each other.

Appian is being used as the basis for an end-to-end operating system for the Rideshare business which includes:

    • Integration w/ multiple 3rd party & internal systems

    • Coordination across a geographically diverse user base spread across many different roles

    • Using Social BPM to provide a landing page for multi-role or occasional users

    • Using Mobile BPM to enable a dispersed team to have visibility & keep the business moving forward while in the field

SNL Financial provides subscribers with sector-specific news, data, and analysis. SNL's 1000+ analysts produce news and data through complex processes for data entry, review, and audit

. Dave Woods talked about SNL's objectives in BPM, which included process customization, automation, and process management maturity.

    • Appian Cloud enabled SNL to move fast!

    • One week proof of concept demonstration of capability

    • One day from contract to production ready environment

    • With only one week of training (plus Appian Forum resources) SNL deployed its first production application: Mass entry of Asian bank data into the SNL database

IBENOX is an Australian consulting firm that provides governance, strategy and technical services. They've delivered Appian solutions for global clients using both onsite and cloud. John Russell shared a case study from a global agricultural manufacturer who needed a dynamic, intelligence-driven product application.

    • Why Cloud?

    • Global Based Users

    • Time to Market

    • Operating in the "Internet of Things"

    • Intelligence Driven ñ Integrated and Event Driven

The agricultural manufacturer used weather forecasts and data from field-based devices such as soil monitoring equipment to dynamically trigger business rules and adjust future work orders.

    • Why Mobile?

    • Customers and Staff are not sat in the office - literally field-based workers!

    • Real-Time work orders dynamically adjusted until the moment of application

    • Real-Time feed back from the field including measurement data, photos and voice notes for HQ review

    • Why Social?

    • Management By Exception

    • Automated adjustment of field based work orders

    • Management and Team notified of events outside the tolerance levels set by business rules

The panelists had a wide diversity of business problems and processes, but they all agreed that cloud is an enabler for successful BPM.