Data-driven creative for sensitive verticals

With big privacy changes, creative has become even more important with verticals like health and wellness and finance. Learn how to make data the backbone of your campaigns.

Low-code automation platform Appian today announced it has acquired process mining company Lana Labs for an undisclosed amount. Appian says that with the addition of Lana, it will be able to deliver actionable and continuous process optimization with people, systems, and data in the same workflow.

Digital transformation and the ability to adapt quickly are critical in today’s business environment. That’s why a growing number of companies are adopting process mining, a family of techniques that support the analysis of operational processes of event logs, with the goal of turning event data into insights and actions. In a recent Deloitte survey, 63% of organizations have already started to implement process mining, and 83% of companies are already using process mining to expand their initiatives.

Berlin, Germany-based Lana, which was founded in 2016 by Karina Buschsieweke, Rami-Habib Eid-Sabbagh, and Thomas Baier, automates the analysis of repetitive business workflows. The container-based platform, which is portable between Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and customer-managed environments, ships with pretrained algorithms for data transformation and automation.

“Lana emerged rapidly as a process mining leader based on our dual commitment to industry innovation and delivering customer value,” Lana Labs CEO Dan Wucherpfennig said in a press release. “This is how Appian built its industry leadership, and we are excited for our future together.”

Appian acquisition

Research firm Gartner estimates the market for hyperautomation-enabling technologies will reach $596 billion in 2022, up nearly 24% from the $481.6 billion in 2020. For example, the robotic process automation (RPA) market is expected to reach $12 billion by 2023. As organizations look for ways to accelerate the digitization and structuring of data and content, technologies like document ingestion and natural language processing will remain in high demand.

Appian CEO Matt Calkins sees a “natural synergy” between process mining, process modeling, and automation. Combining Lana process mining with Appian, he believes, will enable “rapid automation” of analysis insights for organizations’ back-office workflows.

“We believe that our acquisition of Lana means that only Appian will be able to take customers from knowing to doing, in a unified suite,” he said in a statement.

Appian was founded in 1999 by Michael Beckley, Robert Kramer, Marc Wilson, and Matthew Calkins. The cloud computing and enterprise software company, which is headquartered in McLean, Virginia and has raised $47.5 million in venture capital, sells a platform-as-a-service for building enterprise software apps. It’s focused on low-code development, business process management, and case management markets.

Prior to purchasing Lana, Appian acquired RPA company Novayre Solutions SL, developer of the Jidoka RPA platform.

Data-driven creative for sensitive verticals

With big privacy changes, creative has become even more important with verticals like health and wellness and finance. Learn how to make data the backbone of your campaigns.

Presented by Procore

Imagine waking up with the ability to predict every obstacle or misstep you’ll encounter that day. You’d likely save yourself a lot of frustration and maybe even a few dollars. Now, imagine construction companies had the same ability to avoid missteps that could cost them millions of dollars and completely alter their project timelines.

McKinsey estimates that annual global construction spend will reach $14 trillion by 2025 — approximately 13% of the world’s GDP. The UN estimates we’ll add 2.5 trillion square feet of buildings by 2060 — the equivalent of building an entire New York City every month for the next 40 years.

I share these numbers to illustrate the massive scale we’re talking about, and to help people who don’t live and breathe construction understand that efficiently managing construction projects is an immediate, global issue.

In the next decade, we’ll see continued emergence of vertical software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions designed to provide the construction industry with the visibility, data, and predictive insights needed to scale capacity. Construction is collaborative at its core, which means these tools must connect all team members in real-time to improve how they estimate projects, manage design, and control costs.

Prioritizing preconstruction is the secret to scale

Mistakes made in preconstruction are propagated and amplified through the life of a project. Some of the most crucial decisions are made during preconstruction: estimation, takeoff, prequalification, and bidding set the context for the whole project.

These decisions are often managed manually with emails, spreadsheets, and point solutions that don’t integrate with a larger workflow. Siloed systems make it difficult to collect documentation, collaborate on planning and budgeting, select the right partners, and produce multi-faceted bids. This leads to miscommunication, errors, and rework — even multi-million dollar change orders.

Today, SaaS is transforming the preconstruction process to help lay a solid foundation for every project — both structurally and financially — which is rooted in three areas:

1. Centralizing & digitizing projects

Project timelines are complex and dynamic. We hear from customers daily that eliminating silos in the preconstruction phase is essential for accuracy and visibility into project performance.

When everyone has access to the same information, the estimating team can efficiently develop and win competitive bids or price changes that occur. Meanwhile, the project team can move forward without their work being impacted by outdated or lost information in the handoff from the preconstruction team.

Prioritizing connectivity in these beginning stages also pays off in future projects. KSC Inc, a leader in specialty architectural metal fabrication, uses Procore’s integration with Esticom to provide critical feedback to their estimating teams which results in higher accuracy and efficiency for future estimates. There’s exciting potential here; we’re building a robo-take off solution to build estimates from construction docs using AI. This will take the burden off estimating teams, and predictive insights will alert them of any missing items from the plans that could lead to disputes in the future.

2. Collaborative & Efficient Design

Constructability review is a collaborative process between the design team, project team, owner, and specialty contractors to eliminate confusion and rework in the field. A major piece of this is effective building information modeling (BIM).

While BIM itself is not new, construction technology companies continue innovating to make cross-stakeholder collaboration in the design process easier and more useful. For example, Procore recently announced updates to our BIM software, including the ability for teams to track, manage, and collaborate on all 2D and 3D design issues in one location. Design management must go beyond simple design authoring in order to be effective; when you combine best-in-breed BIM tech with a best-in-breed platform, you get supercharged design coordination.

3. Ongoing Cost Management

Data loss and slow-downs largely occur in the handoffs between the preconstruction and course-of-construction teams. Connectivity is essential for accuracy, as well as project cost management. Time and materials are never set in stone, and with narrow profit margins, there’s little room for error.

Stakeholders need accurate and complete information to make decisions, so the solutions the industry uses must be updated in real-time to reflect the project’s true financial health. For example, general contracting company Kitchell Contractors uses Procore’s advanced forecasting and analytics capabilities to enhance cash flow projections, volume of earned revenue, and profit forecasting.

At Procore, we talk about “Deep Collaboration” — meaning collaboration tooling can’t be a destination, it must be embedded in the work itself, and combine productivity and collaboration functionality in one place to get a specific job done. A deeply collaborative future is what the construction industry needs to tackle essential scaling efforts as the global population and infrastructure demands skyrocket.

Learn more about how Procore is helping construction pros lay the groundwork for profitable projects during the preconstruction process.

Tooey Courtemanche is Founder & CEO of Procore.

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