Item: Appian
Rating: 9
Author: Christine Mulready

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Appian across the whole organization. It is used in various ways. The main purpose is to supply needed approval and processing that the enterprise systems do not provide. For instance, it is a way for employees to request company-provided mobile devices to help support customer contracts. An employee can request a device and it will go to the proper approvers and then an order can be placed. There are may be examples within IT processing that Appian fills the need. New employees/contractors requesting user accounts to login to various applications. For HR use, employees can put in requests for Charity fundraising. Also, managers can put in merit request for Recognition Awards. For Financial integration, Project Managers can setup Project Work Authorizations as well and put in Project Risk factors to manage contracts. We also use Appian to request work or long term items that will need to be capitalized over a period of time. Basically, Appian is used as an interface to integrate HR, IT and Financial data across the organization. It provides the necessary tool for approval workflows that are missing in the enterprise systems.

Pros and Cons

Automatic Email Task Notification: Very simple with almost no code required.
Task Escalation: If a user has not completed a task within a certain time frame, tasks can be automatically escalated on a set schedule.
One platform for development. The majority of what is developed for the Internet browser will translate seamlessly to a mobile device. Developers are maintaining code for a browser application and a mobile device application.
Easy to develop applications and re-use code for multiple applications.

Better integration with external DB other than SQL Server.
Export limit of data to Excel needs to be increased.
Date/time stamp of exported data into Excel fix.

Return on Investment

Time Gain: Decrease in man hours to automate manual processing.
Cost Savings: In house development, not paying Contractors to develop applications.
Less Paper: Electronic approvals stored within the process, no more forwarding/printing of email approvals.

Support Rating

When we need help with a development scenario or issue, there is an Appian community forum where Appian developers can post questions and get help. It is also a knowledge base where you can look to see if anyone has had a similar use case or issue. For platform issues, Appian support is very responsive. We have had server issues and Appian will help our server admin very quickly to diagnose the problem.

Usability

From a developer perspective, I believe that Appian is very usable. I have developed in vb.net, Oracle PL/SQL, and SQL Server. Developing applications using the Appian Platform is straightforward. I don't really use the drag and drop features when developing the forms. It's easier to develop in the javascript editor. I do like that that they have this option and it makes it more like an Access interface. There is a lot of automatic behind-the-scenes code that is very nice. There is no code required to assign tasks and send the task notification. There are Excel and pdf tools that are integrated with the product. You just pass in the data and the built-in tools will generate Excel or pdf files. For application users, the usability depends on how the developers create the application. I believe that if the requirements are sound, then the users will have a very enjoyable experience.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce.com

We acquired a company that was utilizing Salesforce for some of their applications. I do not know how it compares against Appian.

Other Software Used

Toad for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office 365

Likelihood to Recommend

I believe that Appian is very well-suited to provide an approval work-flow. For making requests where there is a specific hierarchy of approvals that must occur, it is great. For example, if an employee needs to make a capital request for a long term project, the number of approvals can be set based on the amount of the items/work that is to be capitalized. If the amount is < 10000, maybe only manager approval is required. If the amount is over 10,000, Department Budgetary approval is also required. Over 25,000, Finance approval is required. Over 100,000, executive approval is required. Appian makes it very easy to set these conditions and send out tasks based on them. Appian also Excels at reporting. Appian provides the tools to report on any of the data that is captured in the request. This data can be exported to Excel to be used for audits or data management. Data can be reported in a variety of ways grid format, generate a pdf, or with charts and graphs. I don't believe that Appian should be used to replace any cost accounting type of functions. There are enterprise systems, such as Oracle that do a better job with that. Appian's strength is providing workflows.

Appian Review for Company-Wide Work Flows

Overall Satisfaction with Appian