Self Service Business Process Automation Technology

Blue Prism offers what Forrester Research calls an "Empowered Business Technology." This unique and innovative technology enables accredited business or IT users to effortlessly, securely and rapidly build, validate, and execute new business processes - across multiple applications and systems, deployed into the enterprise production environment. These activities are all managed within a fully IT supported, change controled and governed framework.

The Business Challenge

A business' agility increasingly depends on the ability to quickly and easily modify the decisions and business logic that drive and manage its fastest-changing and most dynamic business processes. As a result, business process automation must be rapidly created and repurposed to meet ever changing business requirements.

With the increasing scarcity of technology skills and resource time required for developing or implementing process automations businesses often resort to either utilising their over burdened internal IT resources or employing outsourcing or offshore partners. Another issue is that business requirements often change between specification and delivery. All these factors usually result in lengthy, costly and ultimately unsuccessful results.

Most organisations have too much of their business logic tied up in apps that are difficult to modify rapidly and adapt to the challenges at the edge of the business. Opportunities for business process automation are often missed and up to 50% of the process automation landscape cannot be economically automated using current SOA initiatives and BPMS approaches. This is because these technologies are not designed for this level of granularity and speed of process change

Employing self-service IT methods for operations teams is the only viable means for dealing with continual change and business service automation requirements.

The Solution

The combination of SOA/BPMS and Blue Prism Operational Agility Software provides almost total coverage of process automation opportunities. Blue Prism enables rapid, transient, smaller but of vital importance local automations, to be configured directly by the business users - delivered within fully audited and controlled, IT governed delivery and support methodologies.

It is this ability for the business users to tackle the "long tail of change," without creating operational risk,that delivers the major benefits of automation - deeper and wider than was previously possible with the business and IT resources available.

Blue Prism complements existing application investments, infrastructure and enterprise data repositories, enabling cutting edge and legacy systems to co-exist and share data easily. Another significant benefit of a centrally IT -managed business user, configurable platform, is the opportunity to consolidate and remove rogue IT initiatives from business operations, and to do all of this without creating new data repositories

Blue Prism is a complete technology and methodology for rapid business process automation

One of the key advantages of using Blue Prism technology is speed to delivery, enabling you to:

1. Automate business processes rapidly which had previously been un-economic to address
2. Rapidly build, test and deploy new components from existing applications using a simple drag and drop process flowchart interface
3. Preserve data integrity by leveraging the existing application presentation layer and underlying application logic with already exists
4. Re-use existing application validation without deep understanding and re-engineering
5. Streamline data evaluation and manipulation with simplified data types

By creating re-useable components that leverage the presentation layer, the integrity of your business rules and application data can be preserved and extended.

This means that solutions can be built, tested and proven in the live context, which, supported by appropriate controls and the Blue Prism methodology significantly reduces deployment timescales.

The Blue Prism product includes the following development components:

Application Modeller

The Application Modeller is Blue Prism's non-invasive, ultra-rapid, wizard based integration tool that allows users to point at existing applications and click the on-screen elements that are required by the business process, regardless of application technology. Once described, the modeller forms a repository for the re-usable service components.

Object Studio

Object Studio facilitates the creation of re-usable Business Objects through a familiar flow chart interface. Application Models are married to context sensitive triggers which wait for particular application scenarios before enacting data retrieval, update and validation through control of the target application's user interface. Sophisticated exception handling provides robust models for services which can run unmaintained with 24-hour availability.

Process Studio

Process Studio links Blue Prism objects with external data sources such as web services, databases, messaging systems and workflow to create a truly joined up approach to orchestration. The familiar flowchart interface allows objects that control legacy systems to be linked to cutting edge SOA architectures in order to deliver maximum benefit without compromising existing architectures and approaches.

Control Room

Once developed, tested and deployed, Blue Prism processes can be executed as web services within an existing SOA framework, as scheduled tasks on a virtualized application infrastructure or as dynamic trigger based processes, using existing enterprise assets such as BPM, workflow and messaging systems to initiate process automations.

These components work in harmony to provide a complete solution for designing, building, testing, deploying and supporting new business processes within robust IT controls and support procedures. The core of the solution is further augmented with modules for workflow, scheduling, Active Directory integration; secure credential management, Web Service integration, reporting and much more. Our implementation methodology and technology is designed to deliver projects 5 to 10 times more quickly than traditional approaches.

For a more detailed overview of Blue Prism operational agility software, read our white paper

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