About Process HQ

Welcome to Process HQ! These pages describe how different users in your organization can support or leverage Process HQ.

What is Process HQ?

Appian's data fabric allows developers to unify, secure, and optimize data spread across the enterprise. With this unified data architecture, you can quickly build modern, data-driven applications that automate your business. But it's not just developers who benefit from a unified data fabric. With Process HQ, you can extend the power of data fabric to business users.

Combining the latest technologies in data fabric, process mining, machine learning, and generative AI, Process HQ allows users to explore data and identify timely insights they can use to optimize their business.

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Process HQ allows business users to:

• Build custom reports and dashboards.
• Analyze and optimize business processes.

Build custom reports and dashboards

Users can browse a catalog of datasets—secured by record type security and record-level security—and quickly design reports to fit their business needs. Users can also partner with Appian AI Copilot to:

• Generate new reports from any available dataset.
• Ask questions of any of their datasets from the data catalog.
• Dig deeper into their reports by using AI-generated insights to identify patterns, trends, and outliers.

Users can combine reports into a unified dashboard. Once they finish building their reports and dashboards, users can save them for future exploration, download their charts as images, or export their grids to Microsoft Excel.

All saved reports and dashboards are easily accessible from the Process HQ home page, where users can view, duplicate, and share reports and dashboards. Users can also access the Process HQ Reports and Dashboards library in Appian Sites.

Analyze and optimize business processes

Users can use rich visualizations to explore how a process actually operates, then use key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor that operation.

Process HQ provides default KPIs that represent the most common ways of tracking process performance and efficiency. Users can also partner with Appian AI Copilot to create KPIs to track the use cases that are most relevant to their organization. Then, users can drag and drop process KPIs onto dashboards alongside other reports for centralized tracking.

When users are ready to look closely at improving the process, they can drill down on specific characteristics and follow the intelligent recommendations Process HQ surfaces along the way.

The results are insights users can easily share, so they can collaborate with stakeholders to optimize your business outcomes at top speed.

Why use Process HQ?

Process HQ allows business users to gain unprecedented visibility into enterprise data and processes.

Everything in Process HQ is powered by your data fabric, whether it's used as a dataset or as process data. There is little to no extra work necessary to allow users to securely explore their data. You can be sure your users have access to the business data they need in Process HQ, and none of the data they don't.

Process HQ also lets business users take advantage of low-code process mining. Your organization will no longer have to manually organize, interpret, analyze, and visualize the complex web of your organization's process data. Instead, Process HQ applies machine learning to discover the most consequential inefficiencies and bottlenecks in your processes, saving you valuable time and resources.

Because Process HQ sources the data it analyzes directly from your data fabric, process analysis is continuous and always up-to-date, and data preparation is one low- or even no-code step that lasts for the lifecycle of a process.

How does it work?

Let's say you're an analyst for a customer onboarding application. You've been tasked with monitoring the customer onboarding process to ensure it's running smoothly.

You start by creating two reports: a chart that shows the number of customers per region, and a grid that shows when the onboarding process takes the longest. You then combine these two reports in a unified dashboard so you can see all relevant onboarding information.

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While you're monitoring customer onboarding, you can't help but notice there's room for improvement in onboarding efficiency. Luckily, Process HQ lets you visualize how your process actually operates. When you add the process to Process HQ, the default view already includes a KPI that shows you how long onboarding takes on average to complete.

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You can seamlessly add this KPI to your customer onboarding dashboard. Now, you've got a single place where you can view all the most important data at once.

You can share the dashboard with colleagues, so together you can collaboratively keep an eye on how onboarding is going, decide how to distribute team resources, and check how often you're missing performance targets.

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Availability

Process HQ capabilities are available in select environments:

• Building custom reports and dashboards is available for all Cloud and self-managed customers.
• Analyzing and optimizing processes is only available for Cloud customers at this time. Self-managed customers and Appian Government Cloud customers cannot access this capability.

Review the feature's compliance to ensure it aligns with your organization's security requirements.

Architecture

Process HQ is built on top of your data fabric. Developers curate data in the data fabric; business users then explore that curated data in reports and dashboards in Process HQ.

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Some additional infrastructure supports the generation of comprehensive insights into your processes. The image below provides a clear visual representation of how data flows in that additional infrastructure, ensuring your data remains secure and compliant within the Appian Cloud environment.

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Data transit and retention

• All of your data stays within the Appian Cloud environment.
• All data in-transit is encrypted using TLS.
• Communication between Appian and the process insights service uses asymmetric signing where each customer site has a unique key used to verify its identity.

When data is synced to the process insights service, structured files with record information are uploaded to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.

The Amazon S3 bucket is:

• Encrypted using keys specific to each customer site
• Segmented for each customer site
• Not accessible by application developers or users

Multi-tenant service

Appian's multi-tenant process insights service is shared among multiple customers and has multiple layers of control to restrict data access to respective customer sites. The service has site-level controls to restrict data access and encryption/decryption permissions, whether that distinction is a separate customer site or a separate site within a single customer's environment. This shared service method reduces costs as production increases.

Actual processing of data occurs in a single-tenant sub-service, providing additional security. This ensures that core data is not processed by the multi-tenant service and is never stored on the same logical container with data from other customers.

Get started

To get started with Process HQ, developers and data stewards should:

1. Connect to data.
2. Secure the data.
3. Prepare the data for reporting and process analysis.

Then, business users can do any of the following:

• Configure a process.
• Explore a process.
• Build reports and dashboards.

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