Overview
Business users are managing complex, multi levelled corporate hierarchies. Without a graphical view, Appian users are resigned to using listed or text heavy views. This results in a cumbersome and inefficient process that is subject to error.
Hierarchies, specifically those displaying business to business relationships, can be quite complex, often exceeding many hundreds of entities with multiple different relationships between one another.
The current situation makes viewing, managing and correcting such hierarchies within Appian a labour-intensive process which relies on list views and detailed text views to see the full scope of the hierarchy. Such a detailed and complex view is error prone and may result in increased operational and financial risks, resulting in a negative effect on the customer experience and increased errors in the overall management of the customer relationship.
Evidently there is a need for a solution that provides a clear graphical view of a hierarchy which enables users to understand the structure visually. This adds value for the end user, giving them a way to visualise the hierarchy and thus provide more confidence when performing actions on client and hierarchy led data sets.
Key Features & Functionality
A graphical hierarchy view that illustrates the hierarchies between related entities.
An ability to show both the parent entities and child entities.
Multiple node relationships:
A child with multiple parents.
A parent with multiple child relationships.
An ability to show that within a parent and child relationship multiple different relationship types exist.
Colour coded relationships:
Relations of the same type are shown in the same colour
Entities of the same type are shown in the same colour.
An ability to zoom in/out.
An ability to center the graph.
An ability to search and identify parent or child entities.
An ability to filter by relationship – each relationship between two entities has a defined type.
An ability to be able to click/hover over entities and be provided with key information as provided by the input data source, as well as a list of any parent and/or child entities if applicable.
An ability to be able to see hierarchies at a glance by having a top-down structure to the hierarchy where those entities with no parents sit at the top and those with no children sit at the bottom. Entities in between are displayed logically.
An ability to be able to see “neighboring” entities at a glance by hovering over a given entity (all those unrelated are then hidden).
An ability to be able to see “neighboring” entities in a wider scope by double clicking a given entity and having all of its direct relations highlighted.
Developers can control the colours of relationships and entities by the use of a settings data input.
Users can move nodes around to get a clearer view of the graph, noting that moving these nodes on the graph does not persist across reloads.