Appian World 2013 Customer Case Study -- Making Smart Investments for Business Growth

Changing the status quo takes vision, commitment, and execution. In the case of Punch Taverns, they hit the trifecta. In just a few months, the team implemented a new way to work and achieved amazing results that yield measurable business returns. Kevin Dalley, IT Director at Punch Taverns, shared his BPM journey atAppian World 2013.

Punch Taverns is one of the UK's largest leased pub companies with a portfolio of around 4,500 pubs nationwide. These pubs are operated by thousands of entrepreneurial partners who run their own businesses on leased pubs. Faced with multiple challenges from decline in beer volumes, smoking ban, the recession, to new competition from supermarkets, it is critical for Punch Taverns to make strategic pub investments to improve sales. The right infrastructure and business improvements can often triple annual sales per pub.

While the investment process is critical to growth, it is also complex and takes 12 to 14 weeks. It requires extensive planning, documentation, collaboration, execution, project management, and effective launch across teams and geographies. Kevinshared the following steps to successfully reinvent the process and implement Appian at Punch Taverns:

• Conduct a series of workshops to understand the current process and design the future, ideal process
• Build the first iteration of the BPM workflow using an agile, iterative methodology, incorporating user feedback
• Present the Appian solution and new investment process, followed by hands-on detailed training in pilot region
• Develop documentation and the investment process, provide support
• Launch initial trial in a pilot region with multiple iterations before a three-month roll-out to remaining regions

Kevin shared that the end users love the new process and how Appian makes their job easier. By providing a central system to store critical investment documents, list project team members, track and monitor the process, the team can work and collaborate more effectively. The average pub investment cycle time is now 5 to 6 weeks, a 40% reduction from the previous process.

Cindy Cheng