CASE STUDY

www.hcltech.com

Platforms &Integration

Client backgroundThe client is a US-based logistics and fleet management company, having operations in three continents. The client embarked on a business process reengineering and digital transformation journey with the help of HCL to optimize its existing fleet management and maintenance processes and modernize its legacy systems.

Engagement areaTo enhance customer experience and streamline business operations, HCL implemented Appian’s Digital Business Precess Management (BPM) solution, leveraging Appian native mobile capability complemented with HCL innovative mobility toolkit app to automate the processes for fleet management and maintenance. It adopted SOA and PaaS to modernize the client’s IT systems/ applications. Toward this, HCL was engaged in the following areas:

• Rental agreement process—Paperless inbound and outbound vehicle rental process using Appian mobile application on tablet

• Agreement types covered—Company uses agreement, shop agreement, transfer of vehicles, resale, non-rental cash, prewrite and rewrite

• Damage inspection process—Standardized data collection (Stencil of damage types), report on fleet quality based on damage metrics, damage metrics by damage type for operational reporting,

• Yard check—Daily check of vehicles available in the yard and report missing vehicles

• Appian PaaS Cloud platform—Enabled with foundational platform capabilities and custom plugins accelerators

Business objectivesHaving been in business for eight decades, the client’s business processes were heavily paper based and time consuming, and its IT systems were on legacy applications. The client wanted to implement a BPM solution to achieve the following objectives:

• Implement BMP for rental counters (Fleet management system)

• Move from an extensive form-based manual entry for rental agreements and damage

• inspection processes to an automated process

• Use tablets to perform all agreements and damage inspection processes for truck rentals

Productivity improveswith togethernessHCL’s solution for damage inspectionreduces a logistics client’s cycle time by 75%

• Design a non-intuitive process for user for performing damage inspection accurately (e.g., scratch/dent precise location and count)

HCL solutionThe Digital Social Mobile Analytics Cloud based solution was implemented by HCL for transforming the rental counter process. It involved:

• Foundational platform capabilities and standards

– Setting up Appian development standards

– Designing HCL BPM cookbook-based solution

– Offering smart service plugins for CMIS, reporting, agreement and correspondence management

– Establishing runtime assurance solution for Appian PaaS to monitor, measure and report on Appian PaaS performance metrics as they relate to user experience

– Creating an auto transaction recovery solution that resulted in 97% reduction of recovery time from backend service outage

– Automating performance test framework of the newer Appian version before upgrade

• Fleet management and maintenance

– Implementing the Rental Counter processes for agreements, damage inspection and yard check

– Providing user management and provisioning solutions

– Implementing service integration methodology and specification

– Key considerations for process transformation considering customer experience design aspects

– Eliminating manual entry of forms for damage inspections

– Designing innovative mobility solution for damage inspection on vehicles complementing the Appian native mobile capability, thus, addressing customer experience and operational efficiency

– Determining key operational and performance considerations with respect to management of damage inspection vehicle images by compression at source and rendering low resolution image for review

– Ensuring that the solution seamlessly performs operation across varied mobile carrier networks (Edge, 3G and LTE) and optimizes on storage needs

• IT system modernization

– Designing smart applications for workflows based on operational metric/feed

– Carrying out legacy transformation and modernization of processes to the Cloud

– Leveraging Appian as Rapid Application Development platform for implementing quick wins and accelerating digital journey

– Integrating localized department-centric process applications

– Automating process based on operational data from peripheral devices

Client benefitsThe mobility-centric process implementation deployed across 400 rental locations in the US and Canada provided a value add of ~USD 3mn over five years, along with the following advantages to the client:

• Enhanced customer experience with reduced paper work

• Improved efficiency around information management, process compliance and dispute management

• Provided digital archival of documents for easier access for client disputes, audits of operational controls, legal claims and inventory management

• Ensured visibility into process performance and metrics of rental staff and the vehicle rental process

• Provided precise insights into fleet availability, vehicle inspection and the damage trends observed

• Provided the ability to measure rental vehicle usage data along with damage details

• Reduced bottlenecks and balanced the workload

• Offered seamless user experience that accelerated user adoption and shoehorned training and rollout within 6 weeks

• Implemented HCL’s innovative mobility solution for damage inspection, which helped reduce cycle time by 75%

• Optimized 80% of data captured for vehicle damage inspections resulting in reduced OPEX costs for mobile data plan usage, storage needs, system scalability and performance

• Improved decision-making by building composite applications

Appian Cloud monitoring screenshots

Appian Cloud Monitoring Solution

Exception Handler Process

Poll Appian Portal Alert

Log Files

Customer Plugin to

Read Alerts

Alerts

Collect Error Events

Collect Performance

Metrics

Appian Probe Agent

Extract Performance

Stats

Performance Data Feed

Appian Probe Agent

Appian Paas EnvironmentMonitoring Tools

ToolsAppian Performance Monitors available directly from mobile devices through the Appian Application

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