03/24/2008

Appian, a global provider of business process management (BPM) technology, announced today that Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the largest rental company in the world, has gone live with its Appian-based Request Online system.

ebizQ received the following:

Request Online is dedicated to efficiently and effectively fulfilling product and service requests from Enterprise’s more than 65,000 employees worldwide. Utilizing Appian, Enterprise can now consolidate functionality to increase manageability of the request services system, collect process-based data for performance reporting, and utilize a common platform to accommodate rapid change and future growth.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car operates more than 878,000 rental and fleet services vehicles and maintains more than 6,900 locations worldwide. The Request Services Department is part of Enterprise’s 1,500-person IT team. With Enterprise’s expansive growth, the number of requests nearly doubled in eighteen months, pushing the previous system to its limits. The legacy system was inflexible, requiring manual data transfers and costly and time-consuming technical resources to make even the slightest change.

“Our primary goal for the system was making the request process invisible – meaning employees don’t need to know or do anything about the process of requesting, fulfilling, or following up,” said Pat Steinmann, Department Manager of Request Services, Enterprise-Rent-A-Car. “We had several significant requirements. In addition to being intuitive for our users, we needed the system to ensure adherence to our many policies and standards, enable the 50+ teams that work fulfillment tasks to manage their workloads efficiently, and enable our department to respond to a rapid rate of change. Appian provided the technology to meet all of those objectives, and also acted as a true partner, assisting us with knowledge transfer, best practices, and training, and listening to our feedback on the product and its development roadmap.”

The 100 percent web-based Appian Enterprise BPM suite offers Enterprise Rent-A-Car unmatched ease of use. Using Appian’s process modeler, Enterprise was able to develop a process modeling approach that mirrored the way service requests were handled previously, giving users a familiar experience while laying the foundation for continual automation of the fulfillment process. The Appian rules engine provides a repository for all of Enterprise’s many standards, methodologies and constants. In addition, Appian is the only BPM suite vendor that could meet Enterprise’s requirements for a fully internationalized product supporting local languages worldwide. Enterprise anticipates utilizing Appian’s rich analytics and business-level reporting to provide on-demand reports that track lag time, task time, process completion time, and bottlenecks around specific tasks. Using this integrated capability, Enterprise will be able to see where a process has stalled, and direct resources to address the specific issue, while also managing existing workloads through better resource allocation, identifying trends for improvement, and planning for future growth.

“Enterprise Rent-A-Car’s Request Online system demonstrates how BPM can transform manual processes through business user-friendly applications,” said Matthew Calkins, President and CEO of Appian. “Appian is dedicated to the success and satisfaction of our customers, and we are proud to be the engine for this innovative solution.”