Following on from the Blue Prism World Conference in London (see separate blog), NelsonHall recently attended the Blue Prism World conference in Orlando. Building on the significant theme around positioning the ‘Connected Entrepreneur Enterprise’, the vendor provided further details on how this links to the ‘democratization’ of RPA through organizations.

In the past, Blue Prism has seen automation projects stall when being led from the bottom up (due to inabilities to scale and apply strong governance or best practices from IT), or from the top down (which has issues with buy-in and with speed of deployments). However, their Connected Entrepreneur Enterprise story aims to overcome these issues by decentralizing automation. So how is Blue Prism enabling this?

Connected Entrepreneur Enterprise

The Connected RPA components, namely Blue Prism’s connected-RPA platform, Blue Prism Digital Exchange, Blue Prism Skills, and Blue Prism Communities, all aim to facilitate this. In particular, the likes of Blue Prism Communities acts as a knowledge-sharing platform for which Blue Prism envisions that clients will access forums for help in building digital workers (software robots), share best practices, and (with its new connection into Stack Overflow) collaborate on digital worker development.

Blue Prism Skills helps in lightening the load with knowledge requirements for users to begin digital worker development. with the ability to drag and drop in AI components into processes such as any number of computer vision AI solutions.

Decipher for document processing was developed by Blue Prism’s R&D lab, and features ML which can be integrated into digital workers, and in turn can have skills such as language detection from Google dropped into the process. The ability to drag and drop these skills continues the work in allowing business users who know the process best to quickly and easily build AI into digital workers. Additionally, Decipher introduces human-in-the-loop capability into Blue Prism to assist in cases for which the OCR lacks confidence in its result. The beta version of Decipher is set to launch this summer with a focus on invoice processing.

Decipher will also factor in the new cloud-based and mobile-enabled dashboard capabilities in the new dashboard notification area which, in addition to providing SLA alerts, provides alerts when queues for Decipher’s human-in-the-loop feature are backing up.

Client example

An example of Blue Prism being used to democratize RPA is for marquee client EY. EY, Blue Prism’s fifth largest client, spoke during the conference about its automation journey. During the 4.5-year engagement, EY has deployed 2k digital workers, with 1.3k performing client work and 700 working internally on 500 processes. Through the deployment of the digital workforce, EY has saved 2 million-man hours.

In democratizing RPA, EY federated the automation to the business, while using a centralized governance model and IT pipeline. A benefit of having an IT pipeline was that the automation of processes was not a stop-start development.

When surveying its employees, EY found that the employees who had been involved in the development of RPA had the highest engagement.

Likewise, Blue Prism had market surveys performed with a partner that found that in 87% of cases in the U.S., employees are willing to reskill to work alongside a digital workforce.

Summary

There is further work to be done in democratizing RPA as part of this Connected Entrepreneur Enterprise, and Blue Prism is currently looking into upgrading the underlying architecture and is surveying its partners with regard to UI changes; in addition, it is moving aspects of the platform to the cloud, starting with the dashboarding capability. Also, while Blue Prism has its university partnerships, these are often not heavily marketed and are in competition with other RPA vendors in the space offering the likes of community editions to encourage learnings.