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How Appian made a difference
August 29, 2017

How Appian made a difference

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Appian

In general, the Support team respond quickly and are knowledgeable and helpful.

Account Management has been good and we have recently had an onsite visit from an Appian Architect and Account Manager to discuss Appian in the Cloud. Follow up from this meeting has been good with further information and pricing information received on a timely basis.

Appian is mainly used by the Administration Department although there are plans to rollout to other departments. Processes have become heavy over the years with lots of re-keying and double checking. Combined with lean processing, Appian has enabled many steps to be removed from processes and increased the automation of the processes resulting in faster turn around speeds, less errors and headcount reduction.
  • Appian allows us to link systems together with data being automatically obtained from different areas of different databases. This has removed the requirement for the user to go to a screen and manually input data which then needs to be re-checked by a Supervisor.
  • Appian enables us to react quickly to an ever changing regulatory environment.
  • The re-useable components within Appian enable us to build and deploy new, straightforward, processes quickly.
  • We haven't found the on-premise upgrade process straightforward. The versions seem to change fairly significantly and the installation guide isn't a good as it could be.
  • Appian doesn't seem as resilient as other applications. For example, a VMware server recently had a failure and automatically failed over to a secondary. Every application running on the server recovered without intervention, but Appian didn't and was unavailable for around 2 hours whilst we worked with Appian support to diagnose and fix the issue.
  • Lacking flexibility around proxy servers but this seems to have been resolved in version 17.3
  • Reduced headcount by removing manual processing and cross checking.
  • Reduced errors by automatically inputting data rather than manually keying.
  • Simplified training as processes are now standardised and far easier to use than previously.

We were attracted to Appian for the following reasons:

- industry leader for business process management systems
- ease of use
- low development platform
- ability to build once and deploy to different environments
- the availability of a java API enables us to interface with our online systems
- simple to use and provides a common application to make adoption easier and reduce training requirements.

We have found that operational users can 'programme' Appian for basic functionality using drag and drop but we have had to deploy a number of developers to work with the operational team for the vast majority of our process engineering re-development.

Appian has proved extremely valuable for the vast majority of the operational processes which we run removing checklists, layers of complexity and removing some manual entry.

We have linked Appian to our online systems which enables seamless straight through processing with Appian tasks automatically raised where manual intervention or review is required.