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UPS Wins 2010 KMWorld Reality Award

Ben Farrell
January 4, 2011

Here's some great news to start the year: we want to congratulate UPS for winning KMWorld Magazine's 2010 KM Reality Award! The award recognizes an organization demonstrating leadership in the implementation of knowledge management practices and processes by realizing measurable business benefits. UPS uses Appian in support of a mandate from the company's CIO to deliver better, faster service at reduced cost.

UPS has achieved its position of global market leadership through a constant focus on reinventing itself and the technologies that drive its business. The IT services delivered to all UPS employees by UPS Shared Services are core to the company's ability to operate efficiently and provide service excellence and accountability to its customers. Although UPS is a technology-driven organization, with an appetite for innovation, the Shared Services group lacked a cohesive infrastructure to deliver end-to-end visibility across its processes. The department used a combination of disparate systems, from mainframes to COTS applications to spreadsheets. While SLAs were in place, there was no consistent method for ensuring that they were met.

A new solution was needed to help Shared Services deconstruct the siloed approach of the past, where individual groups focused on process development and management without looking at the "big picture," and there was no end-to-end ownership as processes crossed groups.

UPS' search for a solution led the group to investigate BPM technologies. However, an immediate roadblock became apparent in that most technologies UPS looked at required heavy outside services involvement due to the complexity of the platforms. Because UPS intended to internally own all solution development, deployment and management without the aid of any vendor professional services capabilities, extreme ease-of-use quickly rose to the top of the requirements list.

Using the Appian platform, UPS has deployed more than 100 process applications - almost entirely on their own withpractically no involvement from our professional services organization. These BPM applications have improved operational efficiencies, enhanced customer service excellence, and generated significant cost-savings. This is a great testament both to the UPS business process management team, and to the combination of simplicity and power that Appian delivers.

-Ben Farrell, Director of Corporate Communications