Hello Everyone. One of our clients is evaluating the possibility to adopt Appian

vsarmien over 12 years ago

Hello Everyone. One of our clients is evaluating the possibility to adopt Appian and has asked a question in regards to the possibility to import process data and process state from their proprietary application into the new Appian BPM application.

Unfortunately, we do not have enough information on the system currently hosting the case data but my intention is to get some ideas on how this could be accomplished. I understand that the migration will depend on how the data is structured in the current application but, assuming that we can export the information in any way we need it, does Appian provide a tool that allows us to map the exported information to the process variables and define the state of each instance?

This is a very vague question but I would really appreciate any help you can provide, at least, to start developing a migration strategy.
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0 Shyam
Appian Employee
over 12 years ago

To get an idea of a case management in Appian checkout the Case Management application in the Shared Components section in the forum.

As far as migration goes, you can create a process model in Appian that retrieves data from the legacy and initiates a case process in Appian. It depends on how the legacy system is exposing the data, is it through a web service, or staged in a database that Appian can access or, CSV file(s). There are OOB smart services for the first 2 and you could use the CSV parsing smart service available in the Shared Components.
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0 vsarmien over 12 years ago

Hi Shyam. Thank you very much. Your input has been very helpful.
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0 David Williams over 12 years ago

I am looking at something similar and one idea I have had is to create a parallel process for "imported" processes. I think the key is to ensure that the data you are importing ultimately has a field that maps to the new process.

The imported data process can then "look" for the relevant step to go in at. I suppose it depends if you want to inherit an audit of the process as well. It is also useful for the Appian process to have a flag to tell if it has been imported or not for reporting.
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0 vsarmien over 12 years ago

@David. Ideally, this parallel process would import the data from the legacy system and initiate the case in Appian, similar to what Shyam has described. Correct? Please, let me know if your approach differs from Shyam's. I would like to collect as many ideas as possible. Thank you very much for your input.
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0 David Williams over 12 years ago

Yes this is similar to what Shyam has explained. Please let us know if you need any more information.
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0 vsarmien over 12 years ago

Thank you very much David and Shyam. I really appreciate your help.
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