Why Automate with Blue Prism Technology?
Blue Prism technology provides the first "Self Service" Business Process Automation platform that takes the concept of operational self service, established with BPMS and Workflow technologies, to the next level of speed and agility. Our technology places the power, to rapidly automate processes, directly into the hands of the business users, without coding and the traditional project life cycle approach. This is all managed within a corridor of IT governance, security and operational control.
The Challenge
Historically, creating new processes in a multi-application environment has been a challenge due to the intrinsic complexity and diversity of modern enterprise architectures. Often built over many investment cycles, incompatible technologies and application silos can reside even within the same business line. Over time this can become a constraint to business performance - both commercially and operationally.
The Blue Prism Approach….
Blue Prism has tackled this challenge head-on. This is achieved by moving the process automation, integration, componentisation and abstraction challenge to the presentation layer of the application stack - which remains consistent across all technologies. Blue Prism has developed a robust, enterprise strength technology capability through re-purposing the presentation layer as a service. This enables hyper rapid orchestration of existing enterprise assets to support rapid build and deployment of process automations - without impacting underlying technical infrastructure.
Previous approaches, dubbed "screen-scraping", whilst having conceptual promise have always been flawed in their execution. A lack of security, scalability, reliability and a brittle integration layer have justifiably given the original implementation of the concept a poor reputation.
Blue Prism is different - the solution has been built as an enterprise platform from first principles, developed in partnership with some of the most demanding and technically advanced global organizations. Using our object oriented multi-layered approach to componentization, enterprise strength security model, exception handler and virtualized appliance runtime platform.
Our customers have shown by implementing Blue Prism software, the concept of presentation layer integration delivers significant business benefits, without compromising IT standards and architectural considerations. In fact, Blue Prism complements and extends the enterprise landscape and provides elegant and pragmatic solutions to costly and technically demanding challenges.
Technology Features
Blue Prism Provides… | Benefit | Deliverables |
Enterprise-class, "Agility Platform" | Centrally managed platform for meeting agile requirements | Enables rapid configuration of existing IT assets into rapidly assembled business process scenarios |
Business empowerment with IT governance | Enables the business to implement agile solutions with IT governance and support | Governance considerations such as audit, test, tracking, monitoring and security are delivered across the platform allowing the business to leverage the benefits of IT infrastructure without requiring extensive resourcing and support |
Secure, centralised solution | Processes and components are managed and controlled centrally | Management, control and monitoring built around a server based architecture, with object oriented principles used to avoid duplication of effort and bring the advantages of object inheritance to business scenarios. |
Active Directory Integration | Processes are authored, edited and run in a secure IT compliant authentication framework | Standard IT security and compliance policies are used to determine who can author, edit and run processes, and on which hardware. |
Rapid deployment methodology | Processes can be quickly assembled to meet urgent or tactical requirements | Object and Process hierarchies build an extensive library of business components, which can be used and re-used across changing business scenarios, with business rules and logic visible in a user friendly flowchart interface. |
Non-invasive technology | Enable closed technologies to be considered for automation | Blue Prism technology allows existing applications to be odelin and retrospectively odelingized without knowledge of or access to underlying data or code structures. |
Process-based architecture | Architecture driven by the business process as the leading requirement | Applications are odelin and odelingized on an "as needed" basis, building a library based on immediate requirement, responding to current demand. |
Request Broker | Load balancing and request pooling for large process implementations | Management of simultaneous process requests is undertaken by the Blue Prism platform and is centrally managed. The same request broker architecture is also shared by the Web Server interface, scheduler and resource management modules. |
Exception Handling | Managed and sophisticated process capability for dealing with unexpected business scenarios | Process flows to catch, evaluate and manage exceptions within Object and Process Modeling interfaces allow unexpected scenarios to be elegantly reported and managed, allowing specific remedies to be applied or manual exceptions created. Exceptions can be re-attempted later or moved onto manual queues for review, leaving the main process uninterrupted |
Workflow Queues | Workload strategies to manage, share, work and report caseloads in a robust and straightforward framework | Business related workflow queues can be constructed and reported in order to manage caseloads depending on business requirements. For each queue, execution time, exception rates and case priorities are available for drill down, within a robust execution framework that includes case locking and exception handling for multi-threaded solutions. |
Process Scheduler | Schedule processes to execute regularly outside business hours | Inter-dependent process matrices can be defined to execute using virtual appliances in regular patterns |
Web Service Integration | J2EE and .NET web services can be consumed by Blue Prism | Existing web services can be referenced via their WSDL location and included in Blue Prism processes transparently - Web Services appear as Blue Prism objects. Blue Prism can also be exposed as a web service provider and processes consumed by other technologies. |
Our solution set is underpinned by a flexible technology in order to provide robust, scaleable solutions that offer almost "instant" integration with the widest range of applications, operating systems and enterprise technologies.
RWE npower embarks on the next phase of an enterprise roll out of the Blue Prism Operational Agility Software.
The case study outlines how a complex business process automation project was delivered 3 to 5 times faster than a traditional IT program.