Blue Prism
PRSM]

Last April, robotic process automation firm Blue Prism bolstered its own balance sheet with a $124 million financing round, enabling the maker of enterprise-class software robots to expand its suite of AI agents and dashboards. Now the company is launching a venture fund to bring RPA technologies to new clients, starting with the Asia-Pacific region before expanding to “the entire globe.”

Blue Prism Ventures is designed to give companies with little or no RPA experience the strategic and technical wherewithal to deploy AI software agents, beginning with the development of intelligent automation business plans and the Blue Prism tools necessary to execute those plans. The firm’s first venture is Blue Vision Korea, a partnership between Blue Vision and tech firm GTPlus, which will give South Korean customers access to three key elements: a drag-and-drop Design Studio to create custom software process automations, a Digital Workforce of software robots that use AI to learn and imitate business processes, and a Control Room to assign and oversee software agent automations.

A Centralized Model for Product Development

At its core, Blue Prism is a robust, highly-scalable, powerful, and flexible RPA platform that provides businesses with a business-owned and IT-supported digital workforce. This digital workforce is built, managed, and owned by an accredited operational team or the company's Centre of Excellence. This code-free workforce can be applied to any department where clerical or administrative work is done in a non-invasive way. Additionally, this out-of-the-box platform has the functionality to meet strict standards of security, control, data integrity, change management, scalability, robustness, and scheduling.

Blue Prism has been built using the Microsoft .NET Framework. It automates applications and supports various platforms, such as the mainframe, Windows, WPF, and so on, presented in ways including a terminal emulator, thick client, and so on. Additionally, being designed for a multi-environment deployment model with both logical and physical access, it includes a centralized release management interface and process change distribution model providing high levels of visibility and control. This provides businesses with a centralized model for product development and reuse. Blue Prism is also proven to support PCI-DSS, HIPAA and SOX compliant processes while providing the necessary security and governance.

The highly scalable software robots can be deployed both on the cloud and on premises. The platform's grid-based architecture addresses potentially significant seasonal variations in operational demand while ensuring high availability, high performance, failover and disaster recovery scenarios.

Blue Prism's Active Directory integration aligns the user access management of the platform with other enterprise applications. It has high levels of flexibility for both encrypting the stored data and securing the communication between different resources.

The secure storage of network and software credentials allows passwords to be private from the administrators while providing a detailed oversight to the IT security team.

Multi-tasking software robots that automatically scale and carry out end-to-end complex process automations move us away from current RPA definitions towards a greatly enhanced model of robot productivity

Additionally, Blue Prism also offers analytics and reporting to drive meaningful BI and MI reporting. It records every system login, change in management action, and decisions and actions taken by the software robots to identify inline process statistics and for real-time operational analytics. Through all these activities, Blue Prism enables management to get snapshots of the organization's performance, improvement opportunities, and identify the scope for revenue and customer satisfaction.

Blue Prism Accreditation Program

Blue Prism offers a comprehensive mentoring and accreditation program to educate their clients’ resources on developing and delivering low maintenance automation to be processed by the digital workforce. The trainees are escorted through an ongoing methodical and controlled accreditation program at a pace that suits them. Following this, further learning is done via the Blue Prism Portal where users receive high-quality eLearning courses to refresh their skills, gain knowledge about advanced or complex subjects, and get on par with the functionalities of the latest products.

Resources receive certification only after completing the online accreditation exam. To appear for the exam, individuals should have completed all mandatory training modules and then have had a minimum experience of three months of configuring processes in a client or partner environment.

The comprehensive Blue Prism ecosystem includes Technology Alliances and Training Partners for customers to have skilled resources and customer guidance for end-to-end process automation efforts. This combination of industry knowledge, expertise, and the technology of a diverse range of products and platforms provide digital workers with an array of capabilities including document management, process mining, and so on.

Blue Prism delivers training courses on their self-led online training platforms or in a classroom through their accredited training partners. The partner community ensures that expertise is available over multiple industries and specializations to provide support and mentor individuals or organizations that seek to gain a recognized certification. Additionally, the accreditation provided by Blue Prism ensures clients and partners that their RPA teams have not only demonstrated their skills but also have completed necessary training with regards to their role.

The Blue Prism Customer Portal

Blue Prism strives to ensure that their clients have all the support that is needed for continued use of their product.

For this, they provide a comprehensive support program that includes a customer portal, service reviews, infrastructure reviews, user groups, and an online help desk.

The Blue Prism Customer Portal is an online resource that provides users with a variety of resources such as product documentation and guides, data sheets, and others. They have a user group which is an interactive, collaborative environment for users to share ideas, discuss problems, share solutions, and offers suggestions for future product functionality. Additionally, their help desk is an online service portal, where once registered, users can access both previous and current tickets through the online helpdesk and also raise new requests through the self-service option.

"Giving our customers the ability to industrialize process discovery across the enterprise not only enriches their automation roadmap but speeds up time to market for the design and delivery of automation"

Furthermore, Blue Prism’s service reviews are aimed at helping clients have a look at the support performance and process, including outstanding issues. It also provides updates on new releases and upcoming projects and other important dates. Their infrastructure reviews are like a "health check" that is designed to take a close look at the hardware and associated software platforms. It deals with best practice recommendations, features that could aid performance, and growth review.

The Impertinent Need for RPA

Blue Prism has helped their clients from various industries including, but not limited to, banking, insurance, healthcare, logistics, retail, travel and transport, and so on. Some of their major clientele include The Co-operative Banking Group and Shop Direct. With their industry agnostic technology, Blue Prism has helped their clients surge ahead of their competitors.

In a typical use case scenario, Blue Prism helped WorldHotels, a hospitality enterprise that curates independent properties around the globe for travelers, automate key customer-facing processes. They were facing issues with managing their different distribution channels and associated rates of their member hotels. Blue Prism was set up to automatically audit hotels and send reports to the hotels and WorldHotels over a 28-day period. If there were any audit discrepancies, both the hotels and WorldHotels had copies with them to discuss the setup and changes in detail. "Through implementing Blue Prism not only have we saved time and money, but it has allowed us to deliver information that enables our hotel community to optimize their business based on up-to-date and consistent data," affirms Torsten Rolke, Director, Global Revenue & Distribution, at WorldHotels.

“Software robots put process where process belongs, inside smart systems,” remarks Jason Kingdon, Chairman and CEO at Blue Prism. He ascertains that smart software robots are the answer to filling the missing gaps in traditional IT systems. He envisions a robotic ecosystem where users can leverage best-of-breed solutions for AI, cognitive and cloud technology. “Consider the benefits to an a la carte menu of services and capabilities that would let you free up the creativity of people to do more valuable tasks: seek out that new market, revitalize sales, spot new opportunity and double output with virtually zero cost,” concludes Kingdon.