John Lewis builds own BPM application on the Appian Cloud platform

Allows all aspects of sales of home furnishings and fitted kitchens to be tracked and managed in one place

Department store John Lewis has deployed its own business process management (BPM) application on the Appian Cloud platform. The application is part of an ongoing programme to create a joined-up system covering the entire sales process from the customer's point of view, from initial contact through to home inspections, contracted installers, the sale and after-sales service. It allows all data related to a sale to be attached to the customers' record, and for this information to be aggregated for analysis to reveal patterns and trends.

Work on the new system started in March 2013, with Appian selected from a shortlist of six suppliers. Mark Fishman, project manager for retail operations development at John Lewis, told Computing that the relatively complex processes involved in sales of home furnishings and fitted kitchens were previously being managed manually.

"The home furnishing department's orders for fitted kitchens, curtains, blinds and floor coverings were often managed using paper, and the ordering and estimating systems were not linked to this," he said.

"This made it difficult for us to have a view of the customer order outside of the local branch the order was placed in, and tasks and follow-up were dependent on paper files. In order for us to be able to offer these services in different formats and across different parts of the business we needed a systemic solution - Appian provided this."

One of the key reasons that Appian was chosen was that it enabled John Lewis to have all the functionality required in one package without the need to bring in outside developers, to build a custom solution from scratch, or to have a separate document management solution.

"We chose Appian because it gave us the flexibility to configure the system to some very specific and bespoke processes and to some of the company's idiosyncrasies. It would have been much harder to do this with custom BPM solution," Fishman said.

Asked about the main pros and cons of the project from a technical point of view, Fishman said the ability to configure the system without outside help was one of the main pluses, and also that "the flexibility to drive some very complex processes with multiple touchpoints" was a key benefit.

On the negative side, in spite of the flexible nature of the PaaS environment, more support was needed from the internal IT team than had been anticipated.

"We probably underestimated the amount of input we would need from our own IT team to deploy the processes. The tool is fine for enabling the business to develop and design processes but you need IT input to complete the build," Fishman said.