HighGear spent three days in Boston, Massachusetts this week for the 2019 Workflow Champions Conference sharing the breadth and depth of the HighGear vision and product roadmap, helping customers “Gear Up” to meet their workflow challenges in the year ahead and fully empower business analysts to achieve digital transformation by becoming Workflow Champions.
Some of the early conference arrivers spent Sunday afternoon at Fenway Park watching the Boston Red Sox defeat the Baltimore Orioles 5-4, with a few HighGear customers and coworkers surprised to make it onto ESPN SportsCenter that night when Orioles’ outfielder Stevie Wilkerson arguably made the catch of the year by jumping into the right field stands nearby to prevent a Boston home run.
The conference kicked off on Monday with our CEO, Vaughn Thurman, welcoming customers to Boston by sharing some local history and re-capping HighGear’s significant milestones since last year’s conference. This included celebrating our 15th year in business, re-branding as HighGear and selling our sister company, along with a 700% increase in new business pipeline, 20% increase in user base and 60% increase in staff size to accommodate that growth.
Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst, Craig Le Clair, delivered the keynote presentation on “The Automation Landscape: What’s Now and Next” to provide customers with an understanding of the path to Intelligent Automation, recommending enterprises follow the “Rule of Five” for RPA success, as well as how automation will change the future of work across the enterprise.
Sammye Klein, Operations Systems Specialist, a HighGear customer for 7 years, provided an in-depth customer use case for how her organization leverages HighGear to generate more than 12,000 workflow tasks each month to automate the production of more than 1,000 digital publications each month. She demonstrated the sophistication of the HighGear visual workflow that she was able to build, edit and evolve over time to manage the flow of periodical production, all on her own, without IT programming or development.
Some of our HighGear customers and coworkers closed out day two of the conference by enjoying an eventful dinner cruise, taking in a spectacular sunset over the Boston Harbor and enjoying the city skyline at night from aboard the Valiant’s 97-foot motor yacht. Attendees were treated to a humorous game of HighGear Family Feud, where customers competed for extra drink tickets by guessing the most common HighGear employee responses to a variety of embarrassing personal questions.
HighGear team members spent the majority of the conference training customers on core HighGear features, before breaking out into separate teams to conduct hands-on workshops each day to build their own custom workflow applications in a matter of hours, from process discovery and form design to workflow and analytics. Six teams competed against each other to discover, design, deploy and document their working workflow solutions over three days to win a variety of prestigious Workflow Challenge awards, as well as a number of consolation prizes for glamorous workflow, ugly forms and over-the-top implementation.
One of the highlights of this year’s conference was the unveiling of the 2019 HighGear Workflow Champion, which was awarded to Sanj Appakonam, Business Analyst at TC Energy, one of North America’s leading energy infrastructure companies with operations in natural gas, oil and power industries. Sanj was recognized for designing, championing, deploying and evangelizing an internal workflow application to manage large-scale infrastructure projects. He was able to make incredible progress within 90 days to conduct process discovery, manage stakeholders, work through diverse opinions, gain internal consensus and demonstrate to the organization that HighGear could accomplish digital transformation faster than any other alternative inside or out of the IT department.
After three days of sharing best practices, participating in advanced training and working side-by-side with colleagues and peers, HighGear customers left Boston full of confidence, clarity and inspiration to build better enterprise-grade workflow solutions for their organizations, departments and teams with our industry-leading, visual no-code platform.
Didn’t make it to Boston? Enroll in HighGear University to access speaker presentations, training materials and workshop activities presented to our customers at the 2019 Workflow Champions Conference. We look forward to seeing you and all of our many new customers in Denver for our next customer conference.
