Upgrading the Surface Transportation Board’s critical case management system with Appian

The Surface Transportation Board (STB) provides oversight and governance for the modes of surface transportation—especially freight rail—that drive America’s economy. The agency’s case management system is the technological backbone that supports STB’s core regulatory and adjudicatory functions. When STB needed a ground-up rebuild of its that system, the agency partnered with ICF to launch a large-scale modernization.

Challenge

The technology undergirding STB’s legacy case management system couldn’t keep up with the agency’s evolving needs. Although modernization was clearly necessary, the effort presented STB and ICF with many technical challenges, including:

• migrating hundreds of thousands of system records and hundreds of gigabytes of documents and files
• overhauling the existing STB website to facilitate the electronic filing of new documents and public searches
• creating scalable platform architecture capable of adding additional workflows over time
• building a secure framework that allows all staff access to the new case management system

Drawing on deep Appian ecosystem expertise, we scoped, designed, and implemented a dynamic case management system that achieved all the major business objectives STB sought to accomplish with this modernization effort. The robust and adaptable system allows STB to more effectively and efficiently carry out its mission by:

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

Results

We delivered this fully modernized, Appian-based dynamic case management system across four product releases, migrating 420,000+ records in the process. Each month, the new system can receive and process 100,000+ website search requests and 150+ electronic document submissions.

By enabling users from multiple STB units to leverage a single platform, the dynamic case management system dramatically increases workflow efficiencies and ensures the agency can effectively carry out mission in support of the American economy.