Case study: Appian’s low-code process automation platform

Virginia-based Appian updates the platform quarterly, and with software improvements in March and more scheduled for May. One of the most important: the addition of process mining technology. Ross explained the tech helps a mortgage process maintain crucial details.

“Many customers already have investments in IT software. These might be legacy systems, like old mainframe systems or ERP (enterprise resource planning), and process mining technology automatically mines the data inside those systems and discovers how people interact with it [in order to] declare a [workflow] process,” Ross said. “It essentially also allows you to measure your conformance to that process.”

That can have important uses for mortgage clients, Ross explained, such as helping to measure conformance to mortgage application requirements such as 1040 federal tax forms.

Beyond process mining, the platform uses other technology and concepts such as business process management, which Ross describes as the larger orchestration of human systems, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation.

“Especially in mortgage loan processing, we deal with a lot of paper forms – proof of residence, collateral they have, initial application forms,” Ross said. The platform “allows us to ingest these documents and then automatically extract the data from that and put it into structured data format without having a human operation, using artificial intelligence.”