Robotics Process Automation has gained utmost popularity amongst businesses that are growing at unprecedented scale. For such organizations, a basic RPA model is not enough, they need a solution that addresses their specific business environment and allows scaling at will. While the market is crowded with such solution providers, its only best to trust the experts with your business. London based Blue Prism coined the term RPA way back in 2005 and is the only listed RPA company globally with over 2000 customers. Now, the firm is turning heads with its Intelligent Digital Workforce platform. The Country Head for Blue Prism’s India Client Engagement, Subhash Chandra tells CIO Insider about Blue Prism’s unique market presence and significance in the RPA domain.

In conversation with Subhash Chandra, Country Head-Client Engagement, Blue Prism

Industrial automation is starting to manifest a glimpse of the future already. The market opportunities are humongous. Where is Blue Prism positioned in the current industrial automation industry? Which are your target segments?
At Blue Prism, we take a strategic approach to building our technology so that it is inherently flexible and adaptable to clients’ needs. It’s not just an ‘off the shelf’ or one-size-fits-all solution.

We’ve positioned ourselves to be able to help businesses in – what we see are - the three key phases of their industrial automation journey, which are productivity – implementing processes that help streamline operations, Digital simplification – enabling intelligent tools to efficiently process and modernize services, and Innovation – creating new ways of working and decision making.

Industries ranging from finance and insurance, to telecommunications and healthcare, are really starting to see the value in intelligent automation, so we’ve been focusing on these key targets.

What is a Digital Worker and how does one contribute to the growth of a company? What are the salient features?
Blue Prism pioneered the concept of the Digital Workforce Platform and has

spent over 12 years developing an enterprise Robotic Process Automation platform designed from the outset as RPA (not converted or copied from another technology) which is robust, highly scalable, secure and reliable. Using an agile digital workforce that follows rules-based business processes and interacts with the systems the same way that users currently do. The Blue Prism solution was designed with key attributes that make it enterprise safe and scalable, endorsed by IT and business operations and capable of running unattended without the need for constant monitoring.

The Digital Workers are given secure logins with access rights and encryption. Data integrity is maintained as the Digital Workers are non-invasive, create no new data and have no impact on existing databases. A control room and dashboards monitor outcomes, review the priorities of the digital workforce, and manage business or system exceptions. The solution is centralized, not on a user’s desktop and managed by the business so processes are easily tweaked or changed without coding or scripting but with highest level of security, compliance and audit controls.

Essentially, a Blue Prism digital worker is a super organized, multitasking software robot that works alongside your people to automate and transform business processes.

Tell us about your Solutions. What is the level of technology capabilities and innovations that we are looking at?
The early years of robotic process automation (RPA) were focused on increasing the efficiency, productivity and quality of work by automating time-consuming, manual tasks. Naturally, organizations still benefit from these critical improvements. But today, enterprise challenges call for even more powerful automation solutions at scale.

Enter Blue Prism intelligent automation; business-developed, no-code automation that pushes the boundaries of RPA to deliver value across any business process in a connected enterprise. Backed by an intelligent digital workforce, intelligent automation expands the scope of work your business can automate, increasing efficiency gains, delivering a return on investment, and even introducing new revenue streams.

We designed our product portfolio to ensure you realize your automation goals and achieve the best return on your investment. From assessment and implementation to process analysis and lifecycle management, Blue Prism products put you on the fastest path to value with 3 broad categories- Discover, Design and Deliver. Discover allows for identifying the value of automation, Design accounts for building the workflows which are to be automated, and Deliver, primarily encompasses launching and managing the digital workforce.

Please narrate one of your successful client ventures.
At BNY Mellon in India, the Funds Transfer process handles a daily average of USD1.65 Trillion payments and is a highly automated environment with a 93 percent straight-through processing rate

By leveraging Blue Prism digital workers to work alongside the processing staff, the Bank can correct and complete the first verification on at least 50 percent of the 15,000 qualified daily manual funds transfer repairs processed. What this means in practice is that: now over 7,500 daily fund transfer repairs are automated, there is a 58 percent faster average handling time of all requests, a 100 percent increase in DR capability and 33 percent increase in coverage (including off-shift).

What are the opportunities that you foresee? Which are the areas that Blue Prism is going to invest in and what’s its future roadmap?
An essential part of every intelligent automation initiative is a sound cloud strategy that helps you meet your business, operational and IT goals, ensuring you can take advantage of Blue Prism’s security, flexibility, and extensibility in the way that best suits your business. At Blue Prism, our cloud delivery strategy includes automation in the cloud, multiple deployment options, and access to cloud technologies that extend your automation capabilities. Blueprism Cloud offering is picking huge momentum globally and we have seen many existing customers benefiting from our all in one single SKU approach with recent additions of built-in OCR, Human-In-The-Loop, Process Capture and Lifecycle Management, SAP Accelerators (with over 400 T-Codes) and Digital Exchange – DX (Online Marketplace with 100’s of prebuilt assets) as part of our existing platform without additional cost offering best ROI in the industry.

Blueprism has also extended automation capabilities by combining process automations and smart workflows with smarter technologies like machine learning, advanced analytics, natural language processing, and cognitive capabilities.

How is Blueprism helping companies to transform and create value for its enterprise customers?
We at Bluepirsm have gone and looked for what works and what doesn’t, and studied how digitally natives organise their companies. We looked at companies that have successfully transformed and realized that democratisation of technology with a platform approach rather than stitching multiple siloed tools together, is what our competition is doing. We have seen great success and scale amongst our customers’ deployment and our platform-based approach. Unlike other tools Blueprism bundles everything into a single SKU so that enterprise organisations don’t have to invest time in managing the software license and achieve ROI much faster without any hidden cost.