On the Radar: Blue Prism
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Blue Prism, founded in 2001, is arguably responsible for creating the fast-growing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology market. It focuses very deliberately on the needs of organisations making strategic investments in robotic automation, and the features of its platform and professional services are designed accordingly.
Who?
UK-based Blue Prism (www.blueprism.com), founded in 2001, is one of the most well-known specialist Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software tools vendors. As well as its UK base, the company has offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Austin, Texas, and Miami in the USA, as well as Sydney, Australia
What does it do?
Blue Prism’s platform, like a number of other RPA offerings – is designed to automate data entry, data gathering and other repetitive, routine, rules based tasks usually carried out as part of high-volume, repetitive service fulfilment work in call centres, shared-service centres, and back-office processing environments.
As with other RPA technologies, the core technology at the heart of the Blue Prism platform is an automated software component that can be configured to drive applications and retrieve and update application data by ‘spoofing’ a human user interacting through existing application user interfaces. However unlike many other RPA offerings, the Blue Prism platform has no desktop recording capability – it’s completely focused on providing tools that automate tasks in a ‘headless’ way, completely replacing human task work rather than augmenting it or assisting it through partial automation.
Blue Prism’s software robots are instances of a single, generic .NET–based program. Each robot takes its cues from an XML-based configuration file. At design time, though, you don’t specify these configuration files by coding: you use graphical modelling tools to do this, and Blue Prism’s approach encourages a clear separation between the different aspects of these models – application models, data models and process models – to promote design clarity and reuse. At runtime, just like a human task worker in a service centre might do, each robot works as part of a team, claiming tasks from a team queue and following its configuration.
The Blue Prism platform is currently at version 5.0, and includes the following principal components:
- Studio. This Windows-based graphical tool is where you specify the models that will drive robots’ behaviour:
- Create reusable structural models of applications’ user interfaces, by graphically highlighting features of interest (form fields, buttons, message areas, and so on) and assigning names to them (for example ‘Customer ID’).
- Define atomic actions on applications (such as logging in, searching for a customer record, performing a rebate calculation) as reusable logic components.
- Define flows by dragging / dropping and linking predefined actions onto a Microsoft Visio-like canvas. You can specify that in between attempting to execute actions, a robot should wait; you don’t define a specific time period, but rather configure a ‘wait step’ to wait for one or more events to happen (such as a dialog box appearing, for example). You can define and reuse subflows, nesting flows within flows: this makes intricate tasks easier for designers and other stakeholders to understand.
Your team’s work in Studio creates XML-based configuration files that your robots use to drive their operations.
- Release Manager. This Windows-based tool provides change management and impact analysis functionality to administrators and designers, so it’s easy to understand which components are used within which processes (and so to understand whether a change in a particular component will impact the operation of particular processes or robots).
- Control Room. This Windows-based graphical monitoring and operational administration tool enables administrators to bring new robots online and assign them to particular processes, shut them down, and so on. Administrators can choose to run groups of robots to a ‘batch processing’ schedule, if that’s appropriate in the broader operational context. It also presents a dashboard that enables administrators to understand the health and performance of their organisation’s platform at three levels:
- At the virtual workforce level – showing the utilisation of an overall population of robots over time.
- At the departmental level – showing response times in relation to SLAs, exception rates, queue volumes and exception patterns.
- At the process level – showing the performance of automated work from a business perspective (for example, the total value of invoices processed) over time. You can explore the patterns of process work in aggregate: for example, you can see ‘heat maps’ of the paths that robots take through process flows most often; and which rules fire most often.
The figure below is a screenshot of Studio, showing a simple ‘login’ process flow.
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The post On the Radar: Blue Prism appeared first on The Advisor.
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