Nexant Advances its Software Solutions with Alfresco Process Services Powered by Activiti

The Company

San Francisco-based Nexant is a globally-recognized software, consulting, and services leader with more than 650 employees around the globe. They provide innovative solutions to utilities, energy enterprises, chemical companies, and government entities worldwide. Nexant provides extensive technical expertise and regional knowledge to enhance energy efficiency programs and processes.
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The Situation

Each customer of Nexant has dozens of highly intricate processes involving many users and complex integrations to numerous systems of record.

Typically handling upwards of a million simultaneous process instances, high performance at internet scale was mandatory.

The Nexant software division created a business process management (BPM) solution to manage the specific processes utility companies use to replace equipment on commercial and residential sites, as well as the rebate management processes. The legacy BPM product they were dependent on had become problematic leading to customer dissatisfaction and escalating operational costs meaning it had to be replaced.

“We were experiencing significant performance and reliability problems with our existing BPM product. It had a lot of issues and our development team had to create an incredible number of manual processes to troubleshoot and work around the bugs. We needed to replace it with a modern, reliable, and high-performing BPM platform that would improve overall customer satisfaction,” said Simon Evans, Vice President of Engineering at Nexant.

The Process

Zia Consulting began the project with a discovery and process assessment. Initially, three departments within corporate legal were assessed for ECM solution implementation. Once the right department was identified, Zia began to build a roadmap for the project which detailed the assessment findings and the agile project delivery methods of Zia. Ultimately, Zia and the customer chose the implementation and customization of Alfresco Enterprise for the project.

The Solution

While evaluating solutions, Nexant had the following criteria for its new BPM platform: open source, open industry standards, reliability, scalability, and comprehensive enterprise support. Nexant chose Alfresco Process Services Powered by Activiti (Activiti) as their next generation BPM product and Zia Consulting as the solution partner.

Zia worked with the IT team at Nexant to provide SME on Activiti for things related to installation, configuration, and integration. Together, they created customizations in the Activiti application, allowing for usage of external data and the streamlining of certain actions used in the platform.

The Results

Today, Nexant customers can use the web-based process modeler in Activiti to effectively design and document their business processes. With the power of Activiti, Nexant customers are able to develop their own processes with precision and accuracy saving Nexant time and money while increasing time-to-value for their customers. Activiti is the underlying process execution engine for all core business processes—including the ability to track rebates—which drives the financial performance of the overall solution.

“With our previous platform, we had to hire and engage the vendor to make every change,” said Evans. “With Activiti, we can do it ourselves which is faster, cheaper, and ultimately improves customer satisfaction and the overall economic value of our offering.”

The agility of Activiti enabled Nexant to seamlessly replace their legacy BPM without interrupting day-to-day business operations. The Activiti platform performs faster and with minimal errors at very high transaction volumes.

“Alfresco is a good match for us because they understand enterprise software and large scale enterprise environments. With Alfresco, there has been a reduction in support cases and faster overall processing times—greatly improving the customer experience.”

— Simon Evans, VP of Engineering