KONE
Every day, millions of people across the world move through airports, offices, and shopping centers via an elevator, escalator, or turnstile powered by KONE. For a global company serving 500,000 customers in 60 countries with over 60,000 employees, efficiency is paramount. And because a company’s people flow and building modernization solutions play a critical role in urban life, digital innovation is essential. That is why KONE is continuously investing in a digitally connected world where customers, equipment, and employees are connected seamlessly.
Business problem.
Siloed information, process variation, and the inability to view data in real time were impacting efficiency across several KONE departments. The need to harmonize processes, tooling, and information sharing was an important business reason to place automation at the core of enablement.
KONE saw a strategic role for Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) to play as a key digital enabler.
Appian solution.
This journey began in 2009 when KONE selected Appian as their business process management (BPM) platform. The KONE Process Manager connects business units and the company’s Shared Services Center. In 2019, KONE moved its platform to the cloud and acquired innovative technologies, including artificial intelligence.
To optimize both customer-facing and internal workflows, KONE uses Appian low-code to bring people, processes, and data together in an app that acts as an orchestrator, automatically assigning tasks to the right people at the right time. The Appian Low-Code Automation Platform (which runs on Amazon Web Services) extracts data from KONE’s source systems, removing the burden of logging in and out of multiple systems to find the right data and offering real-time insights into each process.
Appian IPA capabilities combine the power of BPM, machine learning, and robotic process automation (RPA) with the speed of low-code development. By taking over repetitive, routine, and manual tasks, this combination of technologies allows KONE employees to focus on what matters most—their customers.
“We were missing the orchestrating layer between people and systems. Our KONE Process Manager, built on the Appian platform, brought clarity to operations, simplified daily work, and provided a platform for subsequent service-enhancing capabilities,” says Lulu Zhang, Head of Digital Enabling Technologies at KONE Enterprise IT.
With improved visibility and more connected employees, KONE has been able to respond more quickly to customer requests, free up capacity for other business activities, and differentiate itself through faster, more responsive service within internal teams and to customers.
Since its implementation, the KONE Process Manager has connected 4,500 users in the processing of over one million service requests each year.
Intelligent process automation has evolved in its capability to not only mimic human activities, but to actually learn from them and improve over time, without the need for human intervention. This makes it easier for KONE to build smart applications that immediately deliver business impact and improve worker efficiency. It helps bridge the gap between IT and business.
