Frequently Asked Questions

The mortar that holds all intelligent automation building blocks together, robotic process automation (RPA) enables the training and deployment of digital workers to perform step-by-step tasks to complete repeatable and time-consuming processes. With emerging AI technology, RPA is no longer restricted to common back-office processes, and digital workers can use cognitive automation capabilities to work around exceptions and variations with little human intervention.

Intelligent automation is a set of combined technologies that enable digital workers to deliver more advanced automation capabilities. While digital workers derived from robotic process automation (RPA) have skills used for basic automation, intelligent automation enables digital workers to easily integrate with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and master advanced analytical and cognitive skills, such as reading documents or performing activities that require rules-based thinking. Through intelligent automation, Blue Prism delivers an enterprise-grade digital workforce that can perform tasks and manage business processes every day, around the clock.

Blue Prism’s intelligent automation platform connects both the human and digital workforce with systems, cognitive tools, applications and technologies, including AI, machine learning, OCR, and the Blue Prism Digital Exchange, an ecosystem of ready-made automations available to business users at the click of a button.

Blue Prism digital workers are super organized, multitasking software robots that work alongside your people to automate and transform business process. Like humans, digital workers can develop new skills over time, getting smarter and more capable. With AI, Blue Prism digital workers can be trained to take on increasingly complex tasks, manage vast workloads, and make critical decisions to tackle work with greater speed and productivity, becoming a force multiplier in your business.

You don’t!

Perhaps not the answer you were expecting, but it highlights an important distinction. Blue Prism has a clear separation between automations—the work that needs to be carried out—and digital workers, the things that do that work. If you think about it, this makes sense: a digital worker that can only do one thing wouldn’t be very useful! Blue Prism’s approach means that its digital workers are multiskilled, making your intelligent automation implementation more efficient.

How Do You Build an Automation?

Getting started

If you look under the covers, any automation is basically made up of two elements:

Business Logic: The definition of the logical steps that take you from start, to a useful output

Application Interaction: The definition of how the RPA platform engages with each target application

Blue Prism uses graphical workflows: The application interaction workflow is called an Object and the business logic workflow is called a Process. Both workflows are like instructions for the digital workers. They start by reading the Process and where necessary, the Process points them towards an Object. Once the digital worker has reached the end of the Process, including all of the Objects it points towards, the automation is finished.

To build an automation, you must do three things:

• First, you teach Blue Prism about an application you want it to use. This is as simple as showing Blue Prism the application and clicking on the various fields, buttons, etc. This activity is called ‘modelling’.
• Then, you use a drag-and-drop editor to build a workflow diagram for each activity you want to carry out in the application, such as ‘logging in'. Each workflow activity is a page within the object, and it can be as big or small as you need.
• Finally, you use the same drag-and-drop approach to build the process. Workflow steps can be calculations, decisions, logic activities, or a command to use a page in an object. None of this requires any coding or other technical skills, just plain old common sense.

Keeping it real

Intelligent automation delivers an incredibly fast digital workforce, and in a perfect world, it can do the work of 20 or more humans. The problem is that the world isn’t perfect. Input data may be missing or incorrect and applications can respond slowly or in unexpected ways. If automations can’t cope with this, they can cause more problems than they solve.

Blue Prism solves this challenge with exception handling steps that can be added to objects and processes. Exception handling tells Blue Prism’s digital workers what to do if a problem occurs, so it’s really important that you build it into your automations. And it’s simple to do. When you first start designing an automation, think about all the steps in your current manual process where things don’t always happen as anticipated. Ensuring that you include exception handling for each of these steps in your new objects and processes will ensure that your digital workforce performs perfectly in the real world and not just on paper.

Keeping track

Record-keeping is a key challenge for any business. Often, staff are too busy with their daily activities to take notes, meaning that valuable information is lost.

Digital workers, on the other hand, will always do exactly what they’re told, and Blue Prism ensures that every single action performed as part of an automation can be logged, tracked, and stored in a secure and encrypted audit trail. Automation builders have the flexibility to tailor their auditing requirements, and audit logs are automatically generated, in real time, giving businesses a complete history of every task carried out by the digital workforce.

Give it a try

Using Blue Prism is easy. But don’t just take our word for it, sign up for a Blue Prism Portal Account and find out for yourself! You can download the Blue Prism Trial or Learning Edition from the Blue Prism Digital Exchange (DX) for free, giving you access to your own digital workforce. With a range of interactive learning guides in Blue Prism University, you’ll be an automation expert in no time!

Blue Prism digital workers work and learn like humans, while also connecting people, technologies and systems to perform increasingly complex end-to-end activities that drive digital transformation across the enterprise.

To do this, we identified six intelligent automation skills that digital workers require to deliver sustainable success and optimal outcomes. These skills include: visual perception, knowledge and insight, learning, problem solving, planning and sequencing, and collaboration. You can find more information about this by visiting the digital exchange (DX).

Blue Prism is differentiated in the following ways:

Compliance

• Comprehensive, irrefutable audit logs
• End-to-end object and process change history
• System and process execution audits

Security and Access Control

• Veracode Verified Continuous
• Decoupled build and run
• Disk-level encryption and data masking

Scalability

• Reusable and shareable objects/processes
• Many-to-many process assignment
• Processes in parallel

Performance and Stability

• Database layer resilience
• Supports hybrid-cloud infrastructure
• More productive and efficient

Rapid Deployment and Methodology

• Process Discovery
• Robotic Operating Model (ROM®)
• Success Accelerator

Intelligent and Extensible

• Drop-in AI skills from the DX
• AI Labs and Innovation Center
• Data gateways

There are clear distinguishable differences between RPA and BPM.

• BPM requires developers with programming skills to execute. However, RPA is easy to configure, and developers don’t need programming skills.
• RPA generally interacts with applications through the user interface and not through the underlying data layer as BPM does. Essentially, they each automate different types of processes and while BPM needs IT expertise to build automations, RPA does not. Indeed, RPA can be complimentary where BPM is already in place.
• BPM solutions are typically used to link activities between human touchpoints, whereas RPA is more often used to go end-to-end.

Potential opportunities for automation may be found in any part of an organization, from the front to the back office.

When seeking to identify areas for automation, it is recommended that businesses begin by performing an initial top-down analysis to determine the automation potential across each area of the organization. Using the Blue Prism Process Assessment Tool can help organizations create a consistent and strong pipeline of process opportunities. Further information is provided in our Customer Portal (quick registration required).

To generate potential opportunities to feed your pipeline, it is important to identify the business areas to target, qualify the potential opportunities and prioritize when these will be delivered. There are three key stages of the Process Discovery framework: Process Triage, Process Assessment and Process Analysis.

The main priority of each stage is as follows:

• The triage stage: to engage with the organization in order to identify potential opportunities for automation.
• The assessment stage: to confirm the suitability and the readiness of opportunities for automation.
• The analysis stage: to collate the information collected in the Triage and Assessment stages in order to prioritize where the opportunities will sit in the pipeline of work.

In our Customer Portal (quick registration required) you will find information on our ROM (Robotic Operating Model) and on Process Discovery.

When you have identified processes you wish to automate, the delivery approach can be broken down into six key stages:

• Define – examining the ‘as is’ manual process and defining the scope of the ‘to be’ automation
• Design – proposing a ‘to be’ solution design to meet the client's requirements
• Build – making the design a reality
• Test – the delivery team checking the solution they will be presenting to the client
• User Acceptance Testing - the client testing that the automation works as expected
• Deploy – releasing into production and running the automation as BAU

The ‘define’ phase is particularly important as accurately capturing the process to be automated makes the build phase much easier.

Our Success Accelerator will help you maximize the RPA business value and scale your RPA efforts.

Blue Prism’s Robotic Operating Model (ROM®) is a proven step-by-step implementation methodology designed to successfully integrate your digital workforce into your organization so you can scale and grow quickly. This tried-and-true strategy is built on seven foundations, each of which supports transformational change across an enterprise and the creation of a center of excellence.

The composition of your intelligent automation team will depend on the size and scale of your automation capabilities. However, there are some key skills that every center of excellence should have in place. These skills may each be performed as separate functions, or one person may perform multiple functions. Equally, these functions may be performed by partners or internal resources.

• Head of Intelligent Automation – responsible for managing the automation program
• Analyst – responsible for capturing requirements and documenting the process definition
• Developer – responsible for building the process automations
• Process Controller – responsible for managing and scheduling the digital workforce in production
• Technical Architect – responsible for managing the Blue Prism platform infrastructure

Often during initial deployment, individuals are responsible for multiple skills such as being a developer and a process controller. As the teams evolve and grow, roles become dedicated to specific skills such as an analyst doing only process definition work.

It really depends on the skills you already have in house and the way you wish to work. Blue Prism can provide a full range of services from basic training, support and mentoring with a view to quickly getting your team independently delivering ongoing automations, right through to a full turnkey package where we will take responsibility for delivering business benefit within agreed service levels. Our Success Accelerator offers five packages to choose from.

This depends on how you start and structure your journey. The points below are to be considered for the process.

1. Define your vision for automation and secure sponsorship to realize your vision (refer to our Robotic Operating Model)
2. Responsibilities for the Head of Intelligent Automation
   1. Identify opportunities to realize the vision
   2. Prioritize the opportunities
      1. Consider capabilities of the team and how best to utilize these to realize the vision
      2. Center of Excellence (CoE) to use the BP University and gain certification
      3. Qualify the opportunity when building the pipeline – refer to your business case and vision
3. Identify resources with relevant skills in your organization – see role profiles
   1. Centers of excellence in intelligent automation are generally successful when building the capability from within the organization – they know the business, methodologies and processes – this way you only have to train the intelligent automation element
   2. Segregation of duties within the team – start small, think big: the opportunities will drive the capability. Keep your CoE focused on automation delivery – use IT/IS/data governance/risk/application owners as an extension to your team. They are the resident experts in your organization, having them on the journey speeds up the progress – engage early and educate on intelligent automation.
4. Building your Pipeline: resource planning and change management
5. Engaging a Blue Prism Certified Partner
   1. Partners can be used to build the capability, giving you the chance to identify the resource internally or externally
   2. Partners come with a breadth of experience and can hit the ground running from day one
   3. Our partner services and pre-sales teams can help with this, from identifying automation opportunities right through to delivery and building your ROM and resource capabilities

Much like any other form of enterprise software application, it is important that a development life cycle is followed. Part of this is to ensure that any process developed are rigorously tested before being promoted to live. This is achieved with Blue Prism by having three environments: development, test and production. This approach not only ensures that processes are robust and fit for purpose, but it also provides an opportunity to segregate duties and strengthen your security model by restricting which users can create/edit processes in any given environment or promote processes from one stage to the next.

Blue Prism works with any application via its user interface. The solution provides a variety of tools to allow it to automate applications, and also includes the ability to expose and consume web services. There are also a number of pre-built integrations and skills to enable you to utilize a wide range of complementary technology available from our Digital Exchange.

Blue Prism can be deployed in several flexible ways, including as a SaaS offering, on the public cloud of your choice, or on-premises at your office. It can also be deployed as a single instance under a fully centralized deployment and governance model or else under a federated model in which parts of the infrastructure are distributed around multiple data centers.

This means that Blue Prism can meet the diverse requirements of the most demanding of enterprise customers’ needs.

It is a key design point of Blue Prism that we don’t change any of your underlying systems, as this is often complex and expensive to perform. Blue Prism gathers data and integrates processes at an abstracted level using a variety of techniques and interfaces that ensure underlying systems are not impacted.

Security is of paramount importance to our enterprise customers and, with this in mind, Blue Prism is architected to provide a resilient data center solution designed for secure and controlled use at scale. Our audit function is ‘always-on,’ ensuring it supports non-repudiation of action, a key compliance requirement for users operating in regulated industries.

Blue Prism provides centralized command and control functionality for controlling and monitoring your automations. Blue Prism provides users with a day-to-day operational environment that is used to control, monitor, and schedule the Digital Workers across the enterprise, all of which is included within our standard license.

The Blue Prism University offers a myriad of courses and modules to support and educate our clients and partners through all stages of their engagement with the company, product and methodology. Our training offering is online and available via Blue Prism LMS system.

Blue Prism Authorized Training Partners (ATP) offer flexible, role-based, customized, public and private training that prepares learners to achieve the most desirable, industry certifications available. Our instructor-led training courses are delivered via the classroom, or virtually, in any location.

Blue Prism certifications are globally recognized and demonstrate that a learner has honed these skills through rigorous study and hands-on experience in their chosen field. Blue Prism University offers certification programs by area of focus and skill level. To schedule your Blue Prism Professional Certification exam please visit the Pearson VUE site on: https://home.pearsonvue.com/blueprism.