Appian vs. ETO Software (legacy)

Appian is well suited for the areas which involve a workflow. For Example: Consider there is a task and 3 teams are required to work on the task, with Appian we can create tasks for each team and monitor the comments and completion. Together with the integration capabilities, this tool can function in many areas. In our firm, we are using it to automate the workflows for our business teams and help them in capturing the OLA's and SLA's.

Incentivized

I can see from an education perspective how it would be an incredible fit. The functionality is all there and growing. From a CAC perspective, it's still a work in progress, especially for larger CACs where lots more services are provided and the lines between programs blur a bit more. I think that ETO is becoming more user-friendly for CACs and Social Solutions is moving in the right direction too. I can't wait for some of the new features to roll out and be able to use them in our system. I really do think that will improve our user experience significantly.

Incentivized

• Allows at a glance workflow documentation which assists in the need we have for information readiation.
• Drag and drop interface for workflow development greatly speeds our apps time to market.
• Using the advanced features of Appian, we are able to create working sites in a fraction of the time it would take to do so using "traditional" development.

Incentivized

• ETO captures the variety of data that can give us more ways to understand what is happening with the participants we serve.
• Participant dashboards are customizable and can be very helpful for direct service providers in serving their participants.
• The referral system within ETO allows us to make easier referrals between programs and track how often that occurs.
• It doesn't take a strong technical person to set up programs and other pieces within ETO.

Incentivized

• Search issues when type ahead and database search are used in the same field.
• Buttons implementation where user is require[d] to click on the button description - if clicks on the button outside that text - button will not work.
• Problems with using certain off-the-shelf performance tools like WebLoad or Neoload. That is because of different dynamic variables being used internally in Appian - which these tools are unable to correlate. We are still investigating using other tools like Jmeter to overcome dynamic correlation problem for performance testing.

Incentivized

• ETO needs to be mobile friendly because a lot of our staff do outreach work, including all touchpoints, demographics, enrollments, and dashboards on their phone.
• Too many ways to get to the same thing. E.g. Add New Participant Tab, Add New Participant in Navigation Bar, Add New Participant on Home Page, etc. This generates mistakes and a need for very thorough training and tight oversight.
• Inability to remove touchpoints from custom universes once they have already been added. There is a limit of 20 touchpoints per custom universe. If the touchpoints in a universe have become obsolete or irrelevant, there is no way to make room for a new, more relevant touchpoint. Old touchpoints can be disabled but not removed.
• Need to pay extra for email and calendar notifications. This should be a built-in function, as the software already costs a lot, and many organizations cannot afford to spend more to get this vital functionality.
• It would be great if a "Case Conference" chat feature could be attached to participants. Case managers could enter the chat room and relay important information about the participant to each other. This could also work when people aren't there in real time, like emails. The important part is that all of this information would be accessible UNDER the participant's profile or dashboard that it's regarding.

Incentivized

We recently renewed our license with Appian. We are convinced that its flexibility, relative ease of use, the support they provide, there mobile advancements and their general willingness and desire to see us succeed all contributed to our reason to renew our agreement with Appian

Social Solutions has been great for our organization. It has allowed us to not only report on data, but to dive into it to see trends and give snapshots of the current status of our neighbors. Social Solutions has been helpful in getting us to see additional ways we can use our data and ways that it is easier for front line staff to use this tool

Incentivized

There are many differences between using Appian and using other programming languages. Additionally, there are many trade offs that have to be made and that have to be accepted for using Appian. In some cases, you give up control of one small area, but in others, it may open settings that are unavailable to a developer when using other program languages.

Incentivized

6 years of experience dealing with a poor interface, unreliable reports, and broken promises with virtually zero improvements. I have too many issues to list but have an entire file if anyone ever shows interest from a site Manager. I listed some of the issues in some of the first questions in this review and I appreciate the opportunity to share my experiences.

Routine maintenance is announced with plenty of lead time, and the few times I've been unable to log in to the system properly a simple refresh was all that was required to fix.

Incentivized

Mostly really strong now, although I understand that for some years before switching their hosting service to AWS performance was a real issue with ETO and we had frequent problems with pages timing out or other glitches stemming from performance issues. With AWS that is mostly a thing of the past, although it is still a major issue with the reporting tool which is unable to run reports on the entire database due to performance limitations, instead requiring admins to define universes prior to running queries.

Incentivized

Appian is one of the leading low code business automation platforms that support RPA, decision rules, case management, workflow automation, and machine learning all in a single bundle. But it is also harder to implement and replace the traditional business process.

Incentivized

We love the first tier customer support folks! They're friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable within the scope of their position. The experiences we've had with their supervisors have also been mostly good and again they seem to be doing what they can within the scope of their positions. This is what prevents me from selecting 1. Unfortunately, none of these wonderful folks can offer real solutions when things are actually broken. They verify there's a problem and send it to the black hole called "the developers". After that, we don't hear anything useful and we figure out how to live with/work around the problem ourselves. (Requests for updates typically get "still with the developer" responses.) This is highly frustrating given that most of our issues are basic system issues (functionality that worked then broke after an update by Social Solutions, servers not syncing, report universes not flattening automatically, etc.). All we want is for the system to work as designed and to be fixed in a timely fashion when it doesn't. Apparently, that's too much to ask. (And no, we don't expect it to happen instantly, programming and quality control checks obviously take time.)

Incentivized

As analyst I participated in a developer boot camp. At times it was hard to keep up but most of the time it made sense. Trainer took the time to explain and slowed pace down to answer questions etc.

Incentivized

Very boring; hard to get through quickly, but rather effective in demonstrating the use of the platform.

Incentivized

Really good trainer and exhaustive curriculum covered, but ETO is a complex enough system that you don't *really* know how to use it until you've been in the trenches for a few weeks. For instance, I took a Report Writing training and emerged with some fluency in the reports interface and a vague understanding of the process, but immediately encountered a legion of instance-specific idiosyncrasies that would have been totally impossible to address in a webinar training for a dozen folks from different orgs working in different instances.

Incentivized

It was really seamless. SaaS in the true definition of the word. We logged on and started using the product. Very easy.

Incentivized

Hard to say, as I was not with the agency at the time. However, based on our use of the software ~5years later I can say that there were no catastrophic design choices made during implementation that have become unduly burdensome as we've scaled up.

Incentivized

Appian compares favorably with other vendors in the space. It is strongest with business workflow automation and to create custom business applications. The tool base for coding is extremely straightforward and allows for faster coding and deployment. Handles very complex process flows and has the ability to discover new opportunities for automation.

Incentivized

We originally built our program around SharePoint and were dissatisfied by the lack of transparency it provided. We then moved to ETO, primarily because it was the cheapest of the other solutions that we looked at. Now, we are realizing that we are not getting any real value from our ETO system, so we will likely be investing in a more sophisticated system.

Incentivized

The core product scales well, and we've grown quite a bit as an agency during our use of ETO. However, there are some real pain points particularly around creating new programs and managing report universes that require extensive offline checklist resources and a full-spectrum understanding of how changing settings in one part of ETO can have downstream impact in other areas. This can introduce a "chilling" effect on proposed changes to the system, where there is strong incentive to leave things as-is to avoid unforeseen consequences.

Incentivized

• Our IT automated procurement process has sped up time to get paid by a few days on every transaction
• Our approvals are more organized as a result of being put in digitally
• Managing our own tenant requires more than we have available, given the quarterly updates
• Since we have business-critical functions running in the platform, we have to thoroughly review every note of every update. Because of this we skip half of the updates since we don't have enough time to review these changes four times a year.

Incentivized

• It has saved us time in terms of putting together reports for internal use and for external funders.
• Better accountability for gathering information.
• Given the monthly cost of the system we are probably paying too much but the cost of switching to another piece of software doesn't quite justify a move yet.

Incentivized