Blue Prism World 2019 - Key Takeaways

The focus for this conference was "Connected-RPA" i.e. making the platform more open so that it easily connects with other systems and working with partners to build reusable skills that can further reduce implementation time. Here is a quote from Alastair Bathgate (CEO and Co-Founder at Blue Prism) explaining the idea of "Connected-RPA".

“With an array of reusable, intelligent automation skills available through our Digital Exchange app store, connected-RPA lets an organization unleash its entrepreneurs and innovators, giving them the freedom to focus on creative work that drives business forward.”

Automate Together. Automate Better. Automate More

David Moss (CTO and Co-Founder at Blue Prism) and his team elaborated on the idea of "Connected-RPA".

Automate Together

• Improvements to the partner network, the addition of new partners and simplifying the TAP process.
• Improvements to the Digital Exchange (DX). For providers, it means simplifying the process of developing, publishing and monetizing skills. For consumers, it means making it easier to search for, pay for and embed skills in automation.
• Launch of Blue Prism community so that developers can interact with each other to solve problems.

Improving the partner network is a great step as partners provide features and capabilities that are a great add-on to Blue Prism, for example

• Celonis provides process mining capabilities that can help mine logs to identify the best processes to automate.
• Abby provides tools for OCR and converting unstructured data to structured data that can be utilized in automation.
• Appian provides the orchestration layer that simplifies the human-bot interaction and hand-offs.

Automate Better

• Introduction of connectors for multiple new systems.
• Data Gateway is a new way to push log/reporting data from Blue Prism to external systems such as monitoring tools, reporting engines, data stores or flat files.
• Blue Prism will be able to take snapshots of the Work Queue, this information can then be used for reporting and comparison.

Automate More

• Launch of Blue Prism Decipher, an intelligent document processing solution that can scan invoices, identify data points—regardless of their format and location, then extract those data points for use within RPA processes.
• In the near future, Blue Prism is going to release web and mobile version of Control Center that will provide useful insights into the bots
• Blue Prism will also be launching a cloud version of the platform for trails.
• Blue Prism will be launching a community edition in the near future as well.

Customer Success Story

John Capozzolo (SVP, TD Bank Group) did a great job of sharing TD Bank's story. John talked about why they decided to leverage automation, provided insights into their journey, the benefits they were able to achieve, lessons learned and plans for the future.

TD Bank Group has achieved some great success with automation. In my opinion, they were able to accomplish this because they took a very methodical approach, they did not start too big, instead, they split their journey into multiple stages and focused on succeeding at each one.

John also shared some great questions that everyone needs to have an answer for before any implementation.

World Beyond RPA

Ray Wang (Founder and Chairman of Constellation Research) wrapped up the conference with his keynote. Ray talked about trends for the next 5 years, why delivering on AI is not easy, factors of AI success, candidates for AI-driven automation and analytics, how AI can be leveraged to make our lives easier and of course ethics of AI.

A very energetic end to the conference.

Disclaimer: Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.