Upgrading the Surface Transportation Board’s critical case management system

Applying our expertise in the Appian ecosystem, we modernized the case management system for the Surface Transportation Board (STB), an independent federal agency that provides oversight and economic regulation governance for various modes of transportation, with a primary focus on freight rail transportation.

Challenge

The STB needed a ground-up rebuild of its existing suite of legacy applications as part of larger systems modernization initiatives. With a desire to improve system productivity and quality of life, the agency sought a partner that could implement a modern cloud-based solution in support of its mission—efficiently and economically. This extensive legacy modernization project required our team to work through many technical challenges and requirements, including:

• A large-scale legacy data migration for hundreds of thousands of system records and hundreds of gigabytes of documents and files.
• A simultaneous overhaul of the existing STB website to facilitate the electronic filing of new documents and public searches.
• A scalable platform architecture capable of adding additional workflows as the system evolves.
• A secure framework that allows all personnel access to the new case management system.

To deliver the modernized system, we scoped, designed, and implemented a hybrid solution that leveraged the Appian platform and planned incremental releases. This hybrid solution delivered essential functionality from the initial release in November 2019 through the current 1.3 Release delivered in October 2020.

With its new Appian-based dynamic case management system, the STB can achieve all of the major business objectives it set out to accomplish with this modernization effort. The dynamic case management solution, highly robust and adaptable, better assists the STB in carrying out its mission and overseeing and addressing rail regulatory cases.

The system:

• Brings secure, scalable, cost-effective features to support STB operations.
• Enables the STB to better track filings, correspondence, documents, and workflow assignments.
• Captures the needs and wants of all STB organizational units, ensuring a unified platform.

Results

As of March 2021, our team has delivered four product releases and migrated over 420,000 records to the new system. The STB’s dynamic case management system receives and processes over 100,000 website search requests per month and upwards of 150 electronic document submissions per month.

The modernized Appian-based case management system for the STB provides key agency stakeholders and users a unified user experience, enabling users from multiple organizational units to leverage a single platform, thereby increasing efficiencies.