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:

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

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.

Build custom reports and dashboards

Users can browse a catalog of datasets and processes 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 about 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 and specific dashboards that have been added to Appian Sites.

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 available for both Appian Cloud and self-managed environments. Appian Government Cloud customers cannot access this capability. To enable process analysis in a self-managed environment, see Set Up Process Insights for Appian on Kubernetes.

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 following table summarizes how the process insights service is architected in each deployment type.

	Appian Cloud	Self-managed
Data location	All data stays within the Appian Cloud environment.	All data stays within your own infrastructure.
Data in-transit	Encrypted using TLS.	Managed by your organization.
Encryption responsibility	Managed by Appian.	Managed by your organization.
Authentication	Asymmetric signing with a unique key per customer site.	Token-based authentication using credentials stored in Kubernetes secrets.
Storage	Managed by Appian.	Data is written to an S3-compatible object storage bucket and a PostgreSQL database that you provision and manage.
Access control	The S3 bucket is not accessible by application developers or users.	Your organization controls access to the object storage bucket and database.
Service model	Multi-tenant service shared across customers, with site-level data isolation. Core data processing occurs in a single-tenant sub-service and is never stored on the same logical container with data from other customers.	Single-tenant deployment isolated to your Kubernetes cluster. No shared service layer.
Deployment	Managed by Appian.	Deployed as a separate Helm chart, independent from the Appian Operator.

Performance

Process HQ is designed with optimal performance and user experience in mind, leveraging the data fabric and synced record types you already trust.

Process HQ’s no-code reporting generates optimized queries. These queries are limited to utilizing no more than 50% of the available system resources at any given time. This ensures fast, real-time reporting without performance bottlenecks.

Process analysis is more computationally intensive. The analytics workloads that support process analysis are executed on infrastructure isolated from your main applications to ensure operational performance remains unaffected. Additionally, built-in guardrails protect mission-critical applications during process updates. As a best practice, we recommend scheduling process updates outside of your main business hours to maximize performance.

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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