In the first of this three-part blog series, Discover, Design and Automate Your Way to Business Agility, Speed, and . . . the Caribbean?, we introduced similarities between vacation planning and moving your business through digital transformation.
In part 1, we explored the discovery phase: finding out how process mining helps identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your business processes so you can optimize and automate with agility and speed. This is the first phase of vacation planning where you discover what you don't know, so you can secure the best value for your dollar.
In part 2, we’ll look at the design phase and how to build low-code applications and workflows that deliver the business outcomes you need.
Design your travel itinerary (or your business process).
Now that you know where you’re headed on your Caribbean vacation, it’s time to design an exciting itinerary. This is the fun part of planning, and where the magic happens.
A solid, well-defined itinerary will help coordinate everyone in your travel group, organizing all activities in one program, while being flexible in the face of unexpected change. Perhaps some in your group don’t enjoy water sports, or they prefer walking tours to bus tours. Is anyone gluten-free or vegetarian? If so, you’ll need to ensure the right activities and specific restaurant stops are part of the itinerary.
The same holds true in business. Designing an efficient digital business process requires orchestrating your people, systems, data, bots, and AI all in a single workflow. And the ability to manage everything through a single interface is a plus. The Appian Low-Code Platform delivers all this for ease, speed, flexibility and solid governance for successful digital transformation.
The Appian Low-Code Platform lets you design low-code apps and workflows in a visual, drag-and-drop interface that’s accessible to both professional and citizen developers. In fact, with Appian, you can build your apps 10 times faster than with traditional development.
Using data to power workflow optimization and design.
As mentioned earlier, designing low-code apps and workflows involves many different aspects of business processes. And having your end goal in mind will help you know which aspects of low-code are most useful to you. With your trip to the Caribbean, the end game is having a fun, memorable vacation, with an itinerary that makes it easy for everyone to enjoy—and if that itinerary can be shared and repeated, that’s even better.
In a business context, your goal may be faster HR onboarding or easier customer upsell and increased customer satisfaction. Regardless of what your goal is, data is the foundation of the processes to get there. That’s why data fabric and integrations are core to the Appian platform.
Data fabric lets you rapidly design and build data-powered apps that scale with your business. Think of it as the information that you have to access and gather about the people in your vacation group. This information is everywhere, and it will drive your itinerary. And the data in your organization comes from many sources as well. You have a CRM system, ERPs, supply chain management systems, and various databases, and usually each data source is siloed. This disparate data makes it difficult and costly to integrate into a powerful business process.
Appian data fabric creates an actionable data fabric that breaks down these silos and easily connects the information from internal and external sources across your organization, without the need for data migration. This virtual data layer is not constrained by the structure of underlying data sources. Being free of these constraints makes it easier to change data and workflows while providing the flexibility to update and synchronize data in real time across sources. Appian data fabric is flexible and reusable, meaning when workflows change, data can easily change to suit the specific needs of business now, and into the future.
Make your data flow for business process optimization.
We’ve established that the foundation of your digital business processes is data, now we have to organize it into a single, cohesive workflow, just like for your itinerary. Appian’s workflow capabilities allow you to model processes with the visual functionality of low-code. At this point you can bring in teams, including IT, citizen developers, and business users, who can use visual paradigms similar to a flow-chart to create process models for their workflows and applications. These process models can then be saved for reuse by other applications and faster design in the future.
Ensuring a total workflow experience.
Just like your Caribbean vacation itinerary should delight everyone on the trip, your business processes should ensure exceptional experiences for your customers and employees, and anyone interacting with your organization. With the Appian Low-Code Platform, you can easily create unified experiences for your entire ecosystem.
Your vacation may include a day of snorkeling or a spa day that leaves you and your companions relaxed and stress-free. With the Appian platform, you’ll create engaging multi-experience applications that span any device or touchpoint, and your customers are sure to be thrilled. Additionally, every Appian application is automatically mobile. This is critical when considering apps for your field or remote workers. With Appian, you can build apps fast with visual low-code tools that work across any device for a truly native-mobile experience.
The wrap up.
There’s a lot to consider when planning a vacation itinerary, and the same holds true for your business processes, apps, and workflows.
And Appian offers even more support for the design phase that we haven’t touched on here, including dynamic case management, which allows you to focus your work around the central object that is most important to your business, and Appian Portals, which makes it easy to create external interfaces that deliver the power of Appian to your external stakeholders.
The Appian Low-Code Platform makes it much faster to build, modify, and execute enterprise applications. At a time when competition is fierce, Appian delivers immense agility so you can stay ahead.
Now that you’ve designed your itinerary, and your workflow, it’s time to put it into action with automation. In part 3 of this series, we’ll introduce you to the digital workers and how you can delegate work to them. Robotic Process Automation (RPA), AI, intelligent document processing (IDP), business rules, and smart services help businesses massively increase scale, efficiency, and quality.
Ready to accelerate your business? Discover, design and automate your processes with Appian, the unified platform for change.
