sourcingfocus.com interview with Pat Geary, chief marketing officer at Blue Prism.

Can you define your business and your specialities?

Blue Prism’s unique software platform enables business operations in service industries and Business Process Outsourcers (BPO’s) to rapidly automate manual back office processes by creating their own virtual, robotic, workforce. This leads to a significant reduction in cost and waste - whilst improving customer satisfaction.

The “virtual workforce” is built by the operational teams themselves using the "self-service" robotic automation technology from Blue Prism to rapidly build and deploy their own automations through leveraging the presentation layer of existing enterprise applications. Critically, the automations are built by the business but are fully managed within an IT governed framework. Blue Prism technology enables organisations to:

• Automate repetitive, rules based processes rapidly which had previously been un-economic to address

• Deploy robotic automations rapidly to respond to rapidly changing business demands and manage seasonal peaks and troughs in workloads

• Use existing business operations resources to configure and execute automations without needing IT development or specialist IT skills

• Enhance and extend existing BPMS initiatives into the “long tail” of the process automation opportunity landscape

• Rapidly build, test and deploy new components from existing applications using a simple drag and drop process flowchart interface

• Preserve data integrity by leveraging the existing application presentation layer and underlying application logic with already exists

Based in the UK, Blue Prism currently operates in the Financial Services, Energy, Telco and Public sectors.

How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?

Blue Prism provides an enterprise strength platform for robotic automation, proven in demanding back office operations including RWE npower, Fidelity Investments, 02, Shop Direct, the Co-operative Banking Group, Experian, the NHS and a major UK BPO.

Blue Prism is the first company to address the challenge of creating new processes in a multi-application environment by developing a unique, robust, enterprise strength technology capability through re-purposing the presentation layer of existing enterprise applications as a service. This enables rapid orchestration of existing enterprise assets to support rapid build and deployment of process automations - without impacting underlying technical infrastructure.

Using Blue Prism business processes can be robustly automated 3-5 times faster than traditional approaches with the essential operational support and governance but without needing IT development resources. The technology also saves companies the associated costs of IT integration and application development, improves business process efficiencies and liberates IT teams to focus on other key business challenges.

In your opinion - what are the top 3 outsourcing hot topics / trends at the moment?

1. ‘Impact of Robotic Automation on the BPO market” – What does the next generation BPO look like? It is clear that finding cheaper and cheaper labour to process manual back office processes is not a sustainable model. Does Robotic automation offer a way of delivering new efficiencies and new offerings in the timeframes and operational constraints that BPO’s business models dictate?

2. Repatriation of off-shored processes – the repatriation of business processes back in-house poses a challenge to the outsourcing industry. But repatriating services can be as complex and costly process as outsourcing them – Are there new approaches and technologies that make repatriation commercially and technically viable?

3. Indian labour arbitrage and currency volatility – the combination of rising Indian wages and currency fluctuations may erode the historic cost benefits of this model - posing a risk to the future of the offshore BPO market

What does the future hold for Blue Prism?

Blue Prism’s technology will play a key role in helping BPO vendors benefit from a virtual, ‘robotic’, workforce that can quickly automate manual back office processes. This will save vendor costs, and enhance both service and operational efficiencies – ultimately improving their competitive edge.

The economics of the robotic approach is proving compelling. Programs using this approach have been so successful, that major initiatives are now active across many large organisations.

The big difference is that robotic automation allows the business to independently address issues and it clarifies responsibilities between IT and operations, in a way that is supportive. This means that issues relating to data transportation and large system functionality remain the domain of IT and the manipulation and configuration of existing assets, becomes the domain of the business.