Adaptive Case Management in a Worksocial World
The concept of "social business" is gaining attention because it promises to create a more open, fluid and responsive business environment. The problem is that the much-hyped "enterprise social platforms" such as Yammer, Jive and Salesforce Chatter are incapable of delivering on this vision because they are wholly disconnected from a work context. Enterprise social tools may increase communication, but communication about what? They create yet another siloed platform, cut off from broad enterprise processes, systems and data.
This deficiency is particularly apparent in adaptive case management (ACM) work patterns. ACM requires a combination of structured process and unstructured collaboration, but the two must both be firmly grounded in the events, data and enterprise systems relevant to a given case. Because enterprise social lacks that grounding, it cannot keep case events and collaborations in a single system. This means users must collaborate on one platform, and switch contexts to other systems for actual casework. This is inefficient and it precludes the automatic creation of integrated audit trails that increase organizational intelligence on how to better handle specific case types in the future.
The answer is to ignore enterprise social's empty promises, and instead adopt a "worksocial" approach to marrying ACM and social collaboration. Worksocial, as developed by Appian, combines proven intelligent process automation expertise with industry-leading social collaboration and native mobility. Employees can see and act upon all important business events—or even the absence of expected events—arising from any enterprise system. All employees are naturally enabled to turn every business decision point into a real-time "collaboration moment." All of that can be done as easily on a mobile device as it can on a laptop.
Easy Being Green
Green energy industries are just one area where the value is being felt. Houston, Texas-based EDP Renewables North America (EDPR NA) is the third-largest renewable energy company in the United States. Through the design, development, construction and operation of 28 wind farms throughout North America, EDPR NA produces more renewable electricity than the Hoover Dam. EDPR NA's turbine assets are in very remote locations dispersed across the United States. The company's relentless focus on performance improvement led EDPR NA to think of turbine issue management in terms of an adaptive case management approach that links governance to operations to ensure that farms perform optimally while the wind is blowing. Using a worksocial approach has yielded substantial value and competitive advantage for the company.
To transform the industry-standard approach to case and process management, EDPR NA designed a solution called COBRA (short for "COlaBoRAtion"). COBRA is a system for adaptive case management built on Appian's native combination of business process management (BPM) and social business innovation. The solution provides core BPM capabilities (process engine, integrated business rules, event management and real-time analytics). These capabilities are delivered through a zero-training social interface that automatically surfaces business events from underlying systems and presents them for easy collaboration and business action all in the single interface. Taken in sum, these capabilities allow EDPR NA to conduct fast and intelligent resolution of adaptive case scenarios.
Field technicians and headquarters staff use the social interface to initiate new cases, create ad hoc expert teams, prioritize work across cases, collaborate on resolutions and track successful solutions (and related collaborations) in an ever-expanding knowledge base available to the entire company.
Prioritization: In COBRA, issues encountered in remote sites are logged and assigned a priority for solution creation. COBRA uses real-time data about a problem's size, combined with location-specific pricing information in order to determine the issue's ability to affect the company's bottom line. Through a complex algorithm, issues are assigned a score from 1 to 1,000, which provides an absolute basis for objective comparison. This data enables EDPR NA to make transparent decisions about where to assign resources and focus improvement efforts.
Geographic dispersion and department specialization: Wind turbines are highly complex machines, and problems that affect the fleet can have wide-ranging consequences. COBRA gives EDPR NA a platform for structured collaboration around each issue, allowing departments to weigh in on the ramifications (technical, engineering, wind resource assessment, environmental, safety, procurement, legal, regulatory and others) of problems, as well as their potential solutions. COBRA also assigns internal resources to each case that serve as a dedicated collaboration contact to assist on-site managers in reaching solutions. COBRA makes collaboration between disparate locations easy by also serving as a platform to discuss updates and new developments.
Knowledge retention and learning: COBRA centralizes all information generated around a case, creating a constantly expanding knowledgebase of solutions for future problems. This ensures that EDPR NA staff can rapidly respond to similar problems encountered in the future, and prevents the company from having to constantly reinvent the wheel for solution creation.
Results
The system was able to capture more than $100 million worth of issue solutions in the first nine months of use. It gives EDPR NA a modern social business platform for adaptive case management that drives business performance by turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.
The system has created a searchable knowledge base of detailed solutions for potential future issues, including the original case's context, to aid decision-making. COBRA also allows EDPR NA to track the frequency of issues related to specific equipment suppliers. COBRA is rapidly eliminating EDPR NA's reliance on ad-hoc email-based issue tracking, collaboration and document sharing. The files in the COBRA system were accessed more than 3,000 times in those first nine months. Each of those points of access is part of a structured and auditable record of a particular solution instance.
Based on this success, EDPR has now deployed similar solutions for its energy assessment and procurement processes. The company is also looking at additional core areas of operations that would benefit from its unique approach to adaptive case management.