Every five years, LIUNA, the Laborers' International Union of North America, hosts a convention attracting over 1,400 delegates. The labor union needed a way to quickly build a public portal using the Appian Low-Code Platform to reach these delegates without requiring them to create an account or log in. They chose to join the Appian Portals beta program to meet their needs.
Appian Portals securely connects external users to apps without authentication. It allows you to quickly build public websites connected to apps using low-code in a way that is easy to scale and manage.
The alternative option would have been to purchase a high-code solution that would have taken a substantial amount of time to build, or a content management system like Wordpress that would be disconnected from LIUNA’s other systems. With Appian Portals, LIUNA saved two months of manual work—or approximately 640 employee hours.
Before Appian Portals: a manual, time-consuming process.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, LIUNA switched their in-person convention to a virtual event, increasing their need for a public web portal. In previous years, delegates would pick up their convention credentials and materials in person at the convention, and LIUNA employees would manually validate information on-site. During the pandemic, this manual process needed to be digitized. LIUNA needed a fast way to validate each delegate’s shipping information to send their convention information ahead of the event. Without a new solution, validating this information would have taken two full-time employees approximately two months. LIUNA also needed to interact with its delegates in a way that securely integrated directly with its back-end processes and systems.
With Appian Portals: registering delegates in record time.
LIUNA sought to improve the registration process with a public web portal that seamlessly integrated with its existing back-end systems. This integration was important because LIUNA had already captured the delegates' information, and it needed an easy way to connect to its database to verify that information. Already an Appian customer, LIUNA joined the Appian Portals beta program to streamline its registration verification process.
LIUNA had two critical requirements that needed to be fulfilled by launching Appian Portals:
- Fast development time to get its web portal up and running as quickly as possible.
- Easy management to design, publish, and maintain its public portal without hassle.
Appian worked with LIUNA to address these needs, designing a public portal that expedited the registration process without disrupting its existing workflows.
Feedback and results.
With Appian Portals, LIUNA can now register delegates in record time. Since deploying Appian Portals, LIUNA has gained the following benefits:
- Saved two months of manual data entry and validation work—approximately 640 employee hours.
- Build a public portal in a mere two weeks with only one developer.
- Save nine months of development time by building its portal with the Appian Low-Code Platform.
In Spring 2022, Appian Portals will be available as part of Appian 22.1. With Appian Portals, organizations can securely connect their external users and prospects to their apps without authentication.
Visit appian.com/portals to learn more.
