Industry news

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.

It’s taken a long time, but most companies have now set up their stalls in cyber space. The internet provides a perfect platform from which to do business, network and get your name out there – making websites a must-have commodity.

A company’s website is like a shop window – when a customer visits a site, it’s analogous to walking into the company’s office. It’s essential that a website presents an organisation in the right light in terms of appearance and content, but also performance.

Website performance is essentially a measurement of how well a site works for end users. It can be tested in a number of ways, but two particularly telling markers are website downtime and download speed.

Websites that suffer from prolonged downtime and slow download speeds are turning away customers. A business on the high street would do everything it could to keep waiting time to a minimum, and it’s the same for businesses online. Customers vote with their feet (or fingers); if a website is takes too long to load, or proves difficult to access, they’ll go elsewhere.

It’s therefore important to proactively monitor website performance. Improving customer experience is something that all companies should strive to do – and is the easiest way to attract more business. But it can be tough to find the internal resources and time to invest in what is misguidedly an afterthought, or unneeded expense, for many organisations.

This is why website performance testing is something that many companies choose to outsource to a dedicated monitoring firm. These firms specialise in testing websites to their limits, and proactively monitoring performance, while also offering solutions to any issues that arise.

An in depth test would utilise several techniques; most of which would use specialist knowledge and technology that an average company would not have available in house.

Load testing, for instance, can measure how well a website performs under pressure by emulating a high number of users in real-life scenarios. This can be especially important for sites that frequently experience a rush in traffic, such as ticket companies and e-tailers.

There are also techniques that can provide continuous feedback on the general health of a website. It’s possible for website testers to carry out continual performance monitoring – with frequent checks at regular intervals that emulate a customer’s experience. These checks pick up live issues which consultants can use to work out solutions to improve the technical, and therefore commercial performance of a website.

Website monitoring is something that can easily be overlooked. But, with the growing importance of an effective online presence, and the simplicity of outsourcing performance testing to a dedicated firm, it’s an increasingly attainable goal for many companies. Businesses that stay ahead of the game and get their websites in check now will be in a strong position as the online world continues to grow in importance.

GE Hitachi’s bid to construct nuclear power plants in the UK could be faced with obstacles in comparison to other tending offers due to a lack of existing UK supply chains.

The US-Japanese joint proposed programme, which would see £15 billion invested in Gloucestershire and Anglesey if the bid was successful, faces competition from rival bids including Westinghouse, owed by Toshiba and Areva. Both companies have designs being assessed by the UK’s Generic Design Assessment.

A Whitehall source told the Independent that GE Hitachi were hoping that previous experience in the filed would allow them to deliver faster than other bids, but that “they don't have a UK supply chain so it won't be that fast.”

Pakistan’s Allied Bank has awarded a contract to provide mobile financial services to its users to American company Sybase.

The contract is aimed at providing financial services to 130 million mobile users in Pakistan, where a large rural population means that direct bank access is restricted. Sybase will provide Sybase 365 m-commerce solutions to other financial institutions in the country including Habib Bank.

Zia Ijaz, group chief commercial and retail banking group at Allied Bank, commented that: “we are confident that Sybase 365 is the right partner to help us develop and implement a robust mobile banking strategy to tap into the unbanked and under-banked population of Pakistan.”

Barack Obama in a speech last Friday attacked Mitt Romney over investments by Bain Capital which Romney used to run, calling him an “outsourcing pioneer”.

The criticism came after a report by the Washington Post on the company detailed its involvement in helping businesses establish jobs in other countries.

The move continues an angle of attack from Obama’s campaign on the Republican candidate’s past involvement with offshoring.

The flagship National Loan Guarantee Scheme, initiated to as a means to provide SME’s with affordable low interest loans has failed to see a reduction of interest rates on business loans.

The scheme created shortly before the March budget is designed to reduce interest on small business loans by one percent with up to £20 billion available to underwrite the scheme.

However three months after the creation of the programme interest rates have actually increased, while only nine banks have signed up to the scheme. Chief executive of Syscap, Philip White, said: “The NLGS has not yet had the hoped-for impact on borrowing costs for small businesses.”

At this year’s Air Transport Summit in Brussels, Jim Peters, CTO at SITA predicted that Apple would promote near filed communications (NFC) heavily this year.

Mr Peters said that he expected NFC to become commonplace by the end of the year, with the technologies employment in transmitting data to payment terminals.

Peters commented that: “By the end of the year the majority of smartphones that you go and buy will have NFC on them.”

A €16 investment programme from the European Commission aims to give SMEs access to supercomputers based on cloud platforms, allowing small and medium businesses to employ technologies and resources currently only available to big corporations.

The EU funded project is designed to build a super computing-cloud throughout Europe as part of an effort to improve the performance of SMEs in Europe and boost the struggling economy while providing expertise from throughout the EU. Similar projects have existed in France, Germany and Scotland.

As part of the project, SMEs will receive advice from the European commission on how they can employ cloud based supercomputers to improve their business models and overcome obstacles.

29 NHS trusts are tending a joint contract to provide clinical information across the different trusts.

The contract worth £300 million, will include integration, maintenance, management and hosting. Suppliers will need to provide hosting and reporting and will be able to bid for the contract through a supplier framework.

The trusts focused in the south of England are being led by Camden Primary Care Trust. The new system will be used in child, community and mental health services.

Research in Motion has started to cut jobs as part of a move to save $1 billion thorough cost cutting by 2013. The company has suffered in a competitive market in keeping pace with companies such as Apple and Google.

A statement from RIM released on Wednesday did not specify the numbers of positions to be cut or from which locations. RIM is set to release first-quarter earnings from this year on June 28.

The company reported $123 million net loss from the fourth-quarter of 2012. Recent news has seen RIM ex-executives Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie receiving $12 million in exit payments.