Next up was John Cowles from Clayton Holdings, which does risk analysis for the mortgage industry.
Clayton has 240 users across 5 business units on Appian Cloud BPM, and they have only 5 primary resources for building and maintaining the 100+ processes that they have in production. They had limited IT resources and limited budget, and found that software-as-a-service fit their budget and resources well. Initially, they had no IT involvement at all: it was all operations, business analysts and process efficiency people. They found that Appian was easy enough to build applications without IT support, although now that they are undergoing some large back-end system changes, they do have a bit more technical input. They’ve seen an improvement in their BPM cultural maturity, and an increase in adoption rates as well as demand for new applications. Cowles now wants to do everything with Appian: he sees it as a general-purpose application assembly tool, not just a BPM tool. Interestingly, they did what I always recommend: limited or no system integration for the first implementations, then add that later on once they figure out what they really need, and start to see some process efficiencies. This lines up with their Agile philosophy of prototyping everything, and having frequent releases with incremental new functionality.
They have experienced huge efficiency gains due to their BPM implementation and other process efficiency efforts: 38% reduction in headcount in spite of a 6% increase in workload, time saved not doing manual gathering of user performance data, and process improvements in moving from email and Excel to BPM. The focus on change management and process management early on were important for their success. He also recommended collecting the reporting requirements up front to ensure that the necessary data are being collected by the process. Good points, and a nice success story for cloud BPM.