A reoccurring theme thus far at Appian World 2014 has been customer service. From customer general session presentations to break-out sponsor booths, everyone seems dedicated to providing the best enterprise IT service to their customers, members or constituents.
Matt Richard, CIO of the Laborer's International Union of North America (LIUNA), is driving a strategic initiative to overhaul legacy systems and modernize the union's member management system with BPM. All of the union's member outreach, organization, management and operations are governed by the system powered by Appian. Appian Vice President of Federal, Chris O'Connell, spoke with Matt this afternoon about LIUNA's vision, the quick wins along the way, and how BPM is transforming the member (or customer) experience.
LiUNA is one of the most diverse and fastest-growing unions in North America, representing more than 500,000 construction workers, public employees and mail handlers. The union is dedicated to fighting for better wages and benefits, safer job sites, and increased opportunity for the men and women who do the hard and dangerous work of building the North American nations.
The union is modernizing its membership management system, LiUNA Link!, using theAppian Cloudplatform. Appian's combination of process automation, deep data integration, native mobile application access and a social collaboration interface supports LiUNA's goal to modernize business processes and leverage technology to increase efficiency and effectiveness in service delivery.
"Standardizing our data leads to better business intelligence throughout the entire organization," said Richard.
Through LiUNA's work process overhaul, members find a strong collective voice which echoes throughout the entire organization, with bargaining rights, better pay and better benefits. This is achieved through a strong representation of over 400 local affiliates, 40 district councils, and hundreds of funds organizations.
"When we got started with our processes, it was more important to interact with our members than just hand them an application," said Richard. "We had to make sure we were engaging with our members, and that is what led us to the Appian solution."
Efficient process management has been the hallmark of LiUNA's Appian deployment. Union employees, members, and contractors are connected through a standardized workflow, delivering speed, efficiency, and better training. LiUNA has looked at BPMnot just from a process improvement standpoint, but from a data collection enhancement, according to Richard.
"We needed a way to standardize our processes in order to track our members and where they needed work," said Richard. "I don't look at Appian as just BPM. I look at it as an entire ecosystem where we can track and analyze data for our members to get them working."
Mike Ingrisano
Media Relations Manager
