Session Information:

Iceberg Ahead! Anticipate the Hidden Risks of RPA Design and Delivery to Build a Thriving RPA Model that Drives Business Growth

Failing to identify and respond to the hidden risks of RPA design and delivery leads to low-quality digital workers that consistently need maintenance. This reduces the business value generated through RPA because you’re too busy fixing broken processes to effectively scale.

By understanding where these hidden risks lie and how to solve them, you’ll spend less time putting out fires and more time building a thriving RPA model that drives continuous business growth.

Attend this webinar to learn:

• The hidden risks of RPA design and delivery and how they impact your ability to create a value-driving RPA model.
• How to reduce RPA maintenance costs by ensuring you build the right automation the right way the first time.
• How to manage change across high-value automation with speed and precision.
• How leveraging Blueprint in tandem with your RPA tool improves process design and delivery and enables you to scale the scope and ROI of your RPA initiatives

Session Transcript:

Today, I'm joined by my colleague, Matthew Dodgson, who will be presenting. And I'll pass it over to you, Matt.

Thank you very much, Kate, sorry, experiencing some challenges getting off mute here, but appreciate everyone joining us today.

And let's jump into things.

All right. So everyone is seeing my screen.

So, Kate mentioned, my name is Matthew Dodgson. I actually head up the Global Solution Engineering Team here at Blueprint.

Support the delivery of our platform, or Enterprise Automation suite, across a host of different industries, a host of our customers.

I really help them adopt and really bring this platform, modern, intuitive design automation onboard and help them scale their organizations.

And I look forward to talk to you today, about, want to let some of these customers about what they're doing and sharing some of the software design practices. And really, really going to help accelerate your automation workflow.

So now, jumping into exactly what we wanted to cover today, we all know why RPA has become one of the fastest growing technology categories out there today. And why so many organizations are aggressively adopting it, so we won't get into the weeds of the details.

But this is very much something that everyone is aware of, And we all know why organizations are choosing to adopt and really embrace automation.

Just as we all know how RPA can be so impactful and beneficial. We also know that everything isn't as perfect as it seems.

The reality is that rolling out and maintaining an army of bots is actually a tremendous challenge too often.

The industry at large doesn't acknowledge the realities of this challenge, Because of these glossed over challenges, there have been countless studies done where, you know, some of the recent reports over 50% of RPA projects fail to meet their objectives.

And, while 25% of companies have not even achieve the breakeven point, or returned enough hours to the company to pay for their initial RPA investment.

But why, you know, what's what's going on? What is causing this? That's fundamental.

Challenge that seems to be in organizations being able to capture the true value of RPA.

So as organizations race to automate more and more processes, they're hitting a wall.

Missed requirements, poorly designed processes, are leading to low quality automations that need consistent maintenance.

These tedious and expensive changes and fixes are highly reactive, which means that bot downtime is leading diminishing returns and business value, as well as it's really leading to an inability to scale, automation and ships because we're just too busy putting out fires.

Here's the business case, case, for RPA at its most basic return of automation, in the form of improved productivity, quality, cost savings should by enlarge dramatically outweigh AARP's total cost of ownership.

But, the business case is actually being turned upside down.

Because of RPA is cost of ownership, spiraling out of control for a lot of programs.

There's a few reasons why cost would be being inflated, so we'd like to take some time to dig into that.

At Blueprint, we believe the root cause is that today's ARPI workflow is fundamentally broken and inefficient.

Primarily, due to the industry best practice, I'm using documents, particularly PBDEs, STDS, and so forth to define and design those automations.

We've long believed that documents are terrible, medium for software design of any kind.

And when it comes to automation, design via documents, it isn't a barrier is invariably a time consuming and error prone and fraught with hidden risks. Lurk below the surface.

So these errors and gap filled certainly lead to those endless break fix cycles and the failed ROI that prevent customers from truly achieving the value they anticipated and scaling their programs.

The ironic part with automation is that every automation today in the industry that's using documents, is trying to build an automation using the most manual way possible by leveraging all those documents. And that's, that's a huge irony when you think of the whole premise of what automation is there to do.

What are the most common risks when designing and delivering bots?

We have wrong processes, poor process understanding, siloed RPA efforts were missing dependencies, are missing requirements. We've insufficient understanding of what the exceptions are, we have to handle.

There's obviously fundamental errors that could happen in coding.

There's obviously failed change management when system, UI, or regulation changes, or credential changes, or just simple system changes happen.

Essentially, the reasons why bots are breaking and companies are getting stuck in costly break fixed cycles is because people are doing incredibly complex work in documents.

Documents are hard to collaborate on, time consuming to create, and they're not scalable.

They invite delay, bottlenecks errors, miss requirements, and rework into your process improvement initiatives because of how easy it is for critical things like requirements to be missed.

Plus, documents are time and value sucks for your entire team.

Business users are slow, making them. Developers don't read them closely enough.

Texture struggled to ensure proper test coverage, compliance teams throughout the mix, and so everyone is, is only ever going to these documents, too.

Surprise to it, too.

A small degree, surprised, no one's happy.

The outcome of these RPA failures is that organizations are left with low quality bots that get stuck in break fix cycles, impact your ability to actually run your business as planned, and they need constant expensive maintenance.

Quality automation design is much more than just getting the process right.

But perhaps not surprisingly, many folks struggle with this most basic concept. Many organizations and the industry, in general, struggle with this.

And despite increasing adoption, process delivery tools haven't proven to be the answer as they rarely provide the level of accuracy needed.

And even if the discovery tools work perfectly, there are many dependencies and other mandates that are critical, that are critical design attributes that require the engagement of true subject matter expertise, Issues like regulatory, compliance requirements, cert security, and data policies, and understanding the layers of technology that every automation is absolutely dependent on, simply aren't discoverable by a tool.

So this cascade of dependencies and critical design information is rarely captured in a PDD, because documents are not an effective medium for collaboration and communication.

In fact, they promote the opposite.

It promotes you siloed data that most often reflects a single point of view.

These challenges are made worse by the fact that when these poorly designed bots inevitably break, companies struggled to effectively manage these changes, they have trouble quickly and effectively identifying which bossert broken, why and how to resolve the issue, which leads to increased downtime.

All of these design issues, resulting companies spending all their time putting out fires and fixing bots they've already built.

This results in these automation pipelines getting installed, and ultimately, diminished the business value, being return to that RPA investment or initiative.

So what's the solution to help manage and mitigate these hidden risks?

Global, global leaders across industries are increasing the adopting Blueprints Enterprise Automation Suite to identify your design, deliver, and manage those high value automations in order to scale, scope, and impact of their RPA initiatives.

At the heart of the problem, at the heart of the platform, should I say, is a digital blueprint. Now, a digital blueprint? And digital blueprints are much more than just a process model.

They contain everything you need to efficiently and effectively deliver high-quality automation, including detailed process flows, All of those dependencies that relate to the systems, appliance regulation, functional requirements, non-functional requirements, user stories, functional acceptance tests, specific implementation details, and all this are directly integrated.

All this is directly integrated into whatever our pay platform you use. Are Blue Prism UI Path. Automation, Anywhere Power, automate. You name it.

Now, using the Blueprint platform in our digital blueprints, has many benefits, including centralizing all of these assets and stakeholders in one central platform.

This streamlined workflow and improve the alignment so you can move projects forward with speed and precision.

We have intelligent modeling and integrations that make it faster and easier to design and build these automated processes while also improving the quality of those processes.

And our enterprise analytics and dashboarding helps you prioritize and measure what's working, manage, change, proactively, and truly sharpen to scale your strategy across the organization.

Building automations with digital blueprints is the state-of-the-art way twitchy ..., RPA success.

Assist.

this system is purpose built to design automations in a simple way and make it easy and understandable for all parties.

As you can see here, identifying the system, the actions and parameters can even be done in Blueprint for any given automation task, and it doesn't require technical expertise. And ultimately, it's accessible to any business user.

But what, What? But what makes it really powerful and demonstrates the clear superiority of digital design over documents, is how that information is transferred directly into your RPA platform to accelerate development and reduce the introduction of errors, and the translation of design implementation.

The ease and simplicity of digital blueprints will allow things like citizen developers to more readily drive your automation pipeline scale, your RPA programs.

It really democratize how automation can be leveraged across your organization.

Now what makes this all possible is our common object model framework, or as we call it com.

Hom provides an ever increasing catalog of services that form the granular building blocks of automations.

All of these services, and their specific actions, and parameters are mapped directly into your automation development environment.

Through our bidirectional connections, with automation, anywhere Blue Prism, Power Automated UI path, no other platform and the market has anything like that. And it's going to be a game changer, and how people design and build automation.

In addition to Calm and the incredible level of detail and precision it brings to automation.

Design and automation developments. Digital blueprints are loaded with other capabilities.

It provides a centralized repository of referential automation design information that is never out of date unlike documents.

They have a highly configurable review and approval workflow to ensure stakeholders are engaged on the elements that are most relevant to them.

And another totally differentiating capability, is to transform these process models within your digital blueprints, into a myriad of different value added work products that can accelerate or automation implementation.

For example, we can automatically generate all the functional test cases from one of these digital blueprints, or we can automatically generate a backlog of user stories for your process, so your teams can focus their time on the high value activities of building up these user stories, or leveraging these test cases, and not be bogged down with actually creating all that stuff by hand from scratch.

But digital blueprints aren't just for your initial automation design development.

All this detailed process, information and dependencies that we capture, provide the basis, or the ongoing management of an automation across its life cycle.

We leverage that information to provide comprehensive analytics and impact analysis reporting, so that you can actively prevent outages when things change, which they invariably do.

This leads to automations that I have increased productivity and substantially reduce total cost of ownership, because high quality automation is built with digital blueprints.

Don't result in endless value, draining break, fix cycles.

Now, due to this connection, this bidirectional connection that we've established, with all the major RPA platforms.

Blueprint also has the unique capability to support migration automations across these platforms.

We can reverse engineer a digital blueprint from an existing automation, and then we can export it to another new target platform.

This is dramatically lowering the switching costs to enable you to move to a new platform of choice, or simply to consolidate your automations if you already have multiple platforms.

And the added bonus of, as you're doing this, you're creating a catalog of all your automations that you can re-use and leverage and managed centrally through the Blueprint platform.

So to sum it up, digital blueprints are a substantial leap forward in RPA design and developed.

We can radically accelerate your bot development while increasing quality.

Which usually requires a tradeoff.

And if you want to make the leap to another RPA platform, we can also dramatically lower that switching costs, so you can easily and cost effectively help you migrate, once again, leveraging the power of our digital blueprints.

Now, as we mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, many industry leaders have already made the decision to standardize on our Digital Blueprint technology.

And we couldn't be more excited about the opportunity to share our platform with you, and see if we can bring value to your RPA efforts and programs.

Coming back to those hidden risks of designing and delivering bots, we're now going to jump into the Blueprint platform to show you how you can use platform to anticipate and manage these hidden risks and build a thriving RPA model.

All right, So let's do that, let's jump into Blueprint.

So here, we have a digital blueprint for an extract, invoice process that we're currently automating.

This Digital blueprint that you're seeing is what replaces this PDD document process that folks use today, It completely digitizes the approach.

Now, based on previous automations that we've designed and the production bots that we've already cataloged in Blueprint, the system is actually going to recommend Policies, rules, regulations, and other dependencies, That might be myths and apply to this automation specifically.

What's nice is all these dependencies are now going to be linked directly to this digital blueprint and are used to quickly report and identify the impact of changes that happen, when this is live in production.

Most importantly, we can drive, we can actually we can automate these digital Blueprints like generating a boff package and sending it directly to any of the major RFK platforms.

This allows us to accelerate the transfer transition of development and remove the manual PDD document process of handing off to a development team and having them recreate things from scratch.

In this particular case, we're actually going to send it over to Blueprint.

So here in Blue Prism, we can actually see the generated baht package that we created.

Now what you've seen here is the process flow that is actually in front of us was created directly from that Digital Blueprint and it serves as the baseline bot or a bot skeleton that developers can use to get started.

Every step in this process, in this work section, was directly created from that Digital Blueprint.

And as, we create more complex automations, that have multiple levels of process and sub processes over and blueprint, it will do the same thing over in these RPA tools creating pages, and sub pages, and processes, and sub processes, to essentially give the developers a template, and a framework to start filling out.

Now, in addition to the process flow, the digital blueprint also sends over links to all the dependencies for easy access and transparency, as these dependencies and other information change.

Blueprints, detailed audit history allows for quick insight into what has changed by ways to look back through how this regulation, or this requirement, has evolved in this particular example.

In addition to automating these digital blueprints, into the RPA platform into that bot package.

Digital blueprints can also be used to automatically generate a suite of test cases and test scripts.

Which can then be used for development and even u.a.t. testing.

Here you can see we've actually not only generate these test cases, but we sent them into common test management systems like Queue Tests or Cucumber.

In addition to the test cases, digital blueprints can also automate the backlog of user stories needed to develop these bots.

Here, we generated a backlog of user stories for this particular automation and synchronize it directly with jira, from a workflow, from a backlog management standpoint.

But maybe yourselves you use Azure DevOps, version one, raley any other work management system. Blueprint offers.

A bidirectional synchronization with the system, allowing us to generate stories, feed that backlog, and actually be able to take any updates that happen in those work management systems and synchronize the backup stream into Blueprint. Ultimately, keeping everything aligned and connected back to that digital blueprint.

Now in this particular case, if we fast-forward to after completion test and deployment of the automation in that RPA platform, blueprint continues to deliver value throughout the life of this new automation.

Helping to streamline changes and ensure continued compliance, this is where blueprint enables proactive change management.

Here, for example, you have notifications of things that are that have changed or are changing that might affect the automations.

For example, these notifications are summarized at the top of these different graphs, and we can use that, for example, drive and filters on things like, hey, regulations!

And then from these regulations, we can drill into, for example, ones that are high priority.

This filters down to a single regulatory change, in this case, that is happening.

And with one click, Blueprint can tell us directly what processes are going to be impacted or affected through this impact analysis view.

This allows us now to easily see how widespread a change is going to affect these automations, either at a process level, maybe detailed steps, or maybe even affect something indirectly.

Without blueprint performing impact analysis, like, this would be a piecemeal practice where you essentially need to manually isolate each Bot that might be impacted by the change, and then dig into the code to really understand what the implications are.

Here you can see that a change of this part of the regulation is actually an impact five different automations.

including the one that we've actually focused on this extract. the extract invoice or the STP process, should I say?

At this point, we'd like to now alert the owners of this automation that we need to take action before this bot fails and it's subject to our investigation while it sits idly, losing, business value and say that it's supposed to be delivering on.

So now we can click on this alert notification and from there, we can enter a note to those owners letting them know of the change and that they need to analyze their particular automation. So this can notify the teams, the owners, the stakeholders of each of those particular areas of automation.

And the owners have now been alerted without Blueprint the most typical way. This is co-ordinated via e-mail which is definitely not efficient, Not an easy, not easy to manage.

Now, if we switch chairs for a moment and become one of those owners, we log in here as Nancy.

As the owner of that process, I can see an alert on my own personalized dashboard that identifies the regulation that's changed, which is an automation that I need to look at, and really understand the associated comments.

With everything linked, I can go explore this regulatory change, and actually see exactly what it is, and even navigate directly to the Blue Prism process, that's going to be affected, as part of this automation.

So that was a quick overview of, really, the Blueprint platform at Play, around some of these detailed risks.

Now, one of the things we'd like to put up here is for a limited time, we're offering a free custom evaluation and a workshop to really show you a specific proof of Value for your RFK initiative, and how digital blueprints and the Blueprints Enterprise Automation Suite can really save you time, cost, and really mitigate the risk.

Now, if you're interested, please just visit the link on the screen, blueprint ... dot com slash getting started, and feel free to request your demonstration today.

But it's at this time that I'd like to, maybe take a pause and let you guys ask any questions, and we'll turn it back to Kate to read out any questions. We can go through a bit of a Q&A period here.

Great, Thank you so much, Matt. That was wonderful.

So, as as Matthew mentioned, if you do have questions, you can just pop them in the question box, in your little control panel there, and we will, we'll work through those.

So, we do have some questions here that came in during the course of the Webinars. So we'll just style work through those.

So question here from Ronald's, can you clarify why there is a popular interest right now for RPA programs to be switching ARPI vendors?

Sorry, I'm just clearing my throat. Excellent question, so.

The challenge there there is a strong desire in the CRP programs to really realize the benefits that they were promised now, many RPA vendors.

Unfortunately I've oversold the ease of implementation and the ability to capture value in the market.

And that's why I think there will actually be a large number of competitive account transit transitions in the near term.

We've seen, you know, companies like Microsoft, who have made a huge play in the automation space. Now, we've been providing power automate desktop.

I think it's going to be deployed with Windows 10 and all new machines by default.

So they've actually even further commoditize the automation space.

So RPA programs, unfortunately, our burden with too many bot errors and break fix cycles.

And, as I mentioned, in this presentation, they're spending too much time fighting fires instead of building automation.

Scaling totally capture the roi the anticipated when they first started implementing.

And, ultimately, now, they're ready to switch to an alternative provider to really boost scale. Minimize crippling maintenance and support and ultimately get, you know, a better deal on what it takes to run their automations that they need to run in production.

OK, excellent and kind of similar question here from Erwin, why, switching our key providers so expensive and how specifically do you reduce those costs?

Great question. Great question.

So the reason mitigating an entire digital workforce to another arcade platform is so expensive is because traditionally there's no portability in the RP ecosystem.

I mean you can go out there and you can find all these different claims of tools that can actually migrate and migrate the code specifically from one place to another.

But it's, it's very fleeting, you know, apart from one platform couldn't be exported and work in another platform, that's the fundamental challenge.

Each RPA tool speaks the language, meaning there is, you know, a long list of incompatible actions command variables that aren't meant for one bot to be understood another system.

So, what we're able to do, what we've been able to focus on, is we're able to reduce those costs so much because of this common object model we've deployed, and these connections, and the digital blueprint, really focusing on this design layer, is honestly a key part, is, we need to create a common design language, and a common, you know, language that everyone can understand.

And all these, sorry, everyone, meeting, all of these automation platforms can understand, and Blueprint, being able to adjust bots from all the major RPA players.

And then we can actually reverse engineer them into our platform, and convert them into this common format, known as that Digital Blueprint, is really the key. So from their digital Blueprints, can then be automatically sync And another Target RPA tool, you know, meaning, bots no longer have to be rebuilt from the ground up, which, you know, getting back to the core of your question.

The reason it's so expensive to switch today is because basically, every time you re platform, you have to rebuild every byte from scratch and the Blueprint platform helps you avoid that.

OK, excellent, a question came in and hear from Tim, how does the product interact or fit with the UI path automation hub Orchestrator and insights?

Absolutely. So, this is a great question. We have quite a few customers that have, obviously, UI Path.

And UI path has a suite of technologies and where you have something like, Automation Hub, which is really more on kind of the, I would say, project management layer, managing the, the automation pipeline and even managing kind of, you know, that the throughput and where those automations aren't delivery.

The digital fluker platform doesn't really support the automation hub system by capturing all of that design work.

Again, you know, I Customers prior to Blueprint that had automation hub, we're still using documents.

And as soon as you use documents, you're falling victim to the same challenges. So what we're doing for those customers is essentially using blueprint to replace those documents, helped drive the design. And then starting to manage all of that kind of tribal knowledge.

Long term as we move into production and manage and maintain those automations.

Amazing.

And I've got a message here from Jennifer.

How can I help limit the number of errors in my RPA program and the resulting RP downtime so that I can event? Or sorry. I'm just reading the questions not authentic.

How can I limit the bot errors and RP downtime in my ERP program that's preventing me from scaling and realizing better returns?

Wow, that is a big question.

So, as I mentioned throughout the presentation, the solution is ultimately to find a better way to plan and design and really communicate the automation work, other than using manual paper based documentation like PBDEs.

And, and I say this not just obviously, as someone who is working in the system, working with customers every day, but I was no, recently working with a customer who's been doing this and from their first project, just starting to get away from documents allowed a much clearer vision to be communicated and amazing.

When we start driving that, alignment early on, how much more clarity, it brings downstream, so the the bought errors unfortunately, are a byproduct and they are a lagging indicator And the RPT automatic alternate is a lagging indicator of just lack of alignment and lack of clarity early on.

Now, and, you know, to kind of really drive it home the solution, like what we're showing you here with Blueprints Automation Suite, really, slides into the middle of the automation tool chain.

It really is key to delivering that high quality automation and maximizing returns, because better process discovery and better coding.

It's actually not where the challenges are.

Those are things that are, um, you know, we can capture the process. We can build the process today, but the real challenge of all these automation programs is in the middle. It's really in that middle, sweet spot of how we design, how we understand how we communicate with the teams.

OK, great, and it looks like the last question here, unless anyone else wants to pop a last-minute question into the question box. It looks like our last question here is from us and Neil.

Who has asked, how long does it take to implement blueprint, and including the learning curve. So what's the average time to value?

Absolutely.

So Blueprints platform is designed to be intuitive and accessible to all stakeholders. And it's easy to use across business and technical users.

There's also built-in onboarding contextual help resources that really guide users through Blueprint and really accelerate the learning curve.

That being said, we have a starter pack that helps get people up and running and actually does so in less than two weeks.

These give. And there's no limit to the number of users. What we generally find is there's obviously a good spread of folks, like business analysts. Product owners, are business subject matter experts, lead developers.

But the key here is to get a team up and running, and blueprint, and even operational, on their first project in less than two weeks.

Now, in terms of time to value, as I mentioned, in one of the final slide, my presentation, our customers on average, are experiencing a five X return on their investment in the first six months, derived from that increase bought availability, RFK uptime in general, and even just the speed of the automation projects.

So, these are a few of the kind of key timelines of getting woken up and running in less than two weeks and getting that return on investment and actually seeing a huge increase in value in the first six months.

OK, excellent, and actually, we have a follow-up question here from Tim, who had asked about the UI path integration.

But Tim's asking, what is the approximate work reduction of reverse engineering to convert from one RPA provider to another?

Yeah, when it comes to reverse engineering, it's actually an import process, it's, it's, dead simple, I can import any automation, from a UI Path or Blue Prism, in, like, under a minute, or, you know, import a whole package. So, the ironic part is, we spend more time.

You know, we spend more time focusing on what that bot is doing and understanding it, the actual reverse engineering, it's just a simple import process blueprint. Does that import it? Does that mapping behind the scenes? And it produces those digital blueprints for every single process and sub process in that automation.

And then we can focus on redesigning it and refactoring it.

And it gets us more focused on, hey, if we have to redesign, refactor, and approved, we can do that all through blueprint. And ultimately we can get over into the new target platform much quicker and easier.

And if you guys are curious to see any of these things, you know, live, and, and, even with some of your specific examples, I definitely encourage you to reach out.

I, myself, would personally love to take you through some of your bots today is show you how we can reverse engineer them, and even create a catalog, or even migrate them over to a new automation platform.

Amazing.

Well, that looks like all of the questions that have come through, and so, just wanted to remind everyone that just for additional learning. We have a number of really great handouts here. I'm still within the platform to make sure you grab a copy of those before you sign out. But, other than that, just wanted to say thank you so much, Matthew. You did a phenomenal job today, and this was really, really fascinating information that you shared here.

And I'm sure that would be, uh, felt by everyone else on the call as well today. So, thank you so much, and, for everyone on the call, we hope you have a phenomenal rest of your day. Stay safe, stay healthy, And please let us know if there's any way we can, we can help you on your automation journey.

Excellent.

Take care.