Appian World: Company launches ‘hands-on’ process mining program for customers

Appian has launched a new process mining service for businesses which will see the company audit an organization’s data before providing actionable advice on how to improve internal processes.

The service is part of its new ‘Insight to Action’ program - a hands-on approach from the company to prepare and carry out data analysis for customers, then provide action points and findings.

For a one-time fixed fee, Appian will assess an organization’s data and current processes for any inefficiencies and work with the customer to implement more optimal workflows.

After the initial audit is complete, Appian will follow this up with its ‘action phase’ which involves a rundown of its analysis’ findings and ways to improve existing processes.

If required, Appian can also perform a second phase of process mining to validate any improvements.

“I think this is a practice that organizations should be following, to be a priority of strategy all across,” said Karina Buschsieweke, director of product strategy at Appian, to ITPro. 

“Having the ability to adapt whenever something is changing is so crucial, but that mindset of constant change is not easy because culturally humans don’t want to change.

“It’s something that you have to practice, and as leaders we have to put forward.”

The program, announced on Tuesday, is intended as a first step towards businesses adopting process mining, which can be difficult to approach for teams that lack the relevant data processing skills or the means to adequately interpret results.

Customers can also use process mining to identify which Appian tools might best improve their efficiency. 

For example, results could indicate that time to respond to customer emails could be decreased through the use of the firm’s new AI offerings. 

These products can automatically categorize emails to prevent long-winded sorting or filtering from taking too much time away from workers.

Appian will also provide a unified dashboard for viewing results from process mining in real time with Process HQ, which is set to be launched in Appian’s Q3.

In a keynote demonstration, the Process HQ was shown to provide visualizations of essential metrics and allow business users to track improvements in performance.

The system can also generate at-a-glance scorecards for tracking efficiency trends and return on investment.

Real-time responses with process mining can help businesses to track metrics in more detail and across a wider range than ever before. It’s something that Buschsieweke singled out as an area ripe for expansion.

“We developed this for a return on investment calculation, but this concept can of course be applied to many other topics as well which are not features yet such as carbon emission tracking.”

“It’s the same logic as when you have a goal, such as an emissions reduction goal, and then the scorecards let you monitor if you’re reaching this.”

Buschsieweke noted that at present, small businesses aren’t best suited to gain value from the program. 

However, with the eventual release of Process HQ these impacts will be lessened.

“A small business owner doesn’t have their own IT department or people who can do the analysis. If it’s someone that’s already using Appian, in the future they will be able to open Process HQ and get all these insights,” she noted.

“If you’re a small business and you only get a few orders per day, you can probably do a lot with Excel as well or just standard analysis. It’s something you always have to consider, how often your process is running, how complex it is, and how easy it is to get started.”