With a virtual roadshow RPA supplier Blue Prism has opened its new office in the Benelux. During this online event, the strategic vision of the fast-growing RPA market was presented, as well as a look at the roadmap for further development of the software.
Jason Kingdon, CEO and Chairman of Blue Prism, called Benelux ‘a very important market’. “We’ve got over 80 clients there across a whole range of different verticals, and we’re looking to present a more kind of localized offering as well over the coming years. So there’s quite a lot of development taking place. In terms of the RPA market itself, I think it is maturing.”
“Our market is really about enterprise Intelligent Automation. And I think that organizations are getting a little bit more demanding in terms of where it is they want this technology to go, how strategic it should be, and really how it supports services within their organization. So how far can automation go? I think we’re still early days in terms of where we are. The next three, four years, you’re going to see a much heavier consumption of technology.”
Fly by wire
Peter Walker, CTO EMEA, presented a technology overview. “It is really exciting that we are expanding our presence in the Benelux region. We have 25,000 members of the Blue Prism community, there are 5.000 discussion posts online right now. There have been over 600 product ideas submitted and individually commented on by Blue Prism staff and voted on by Blue Prism customers. They can influence our product roadmap. This is really key: 70% of customers surveyed told us that our communities had helped them to increase their digital capabilities.“
“Something really exciting coming out of our AI Labs is a vision around what we’re terming ‘fly by wire’. This is an important concept for complex machinery, that originates from the aircraft industry. As a pilot, you’re in full charge of the strategy for your journey. You’re thinking about the pace, the timing, the direction, and the route. But when it comes to low level implementation, let’s say you want to bank the plane, and turn a corner you might have some physical controls. But actually what really happens is you’re sending instructions to a computer, and the computer takes care of all the messy details around how the engines are going to respond, how to manipulate the wings, and what happens within the machine.”
“We’re taking that same concept to scale a digital workforce. This workforce becomes much too complex for a person to understand, even though to name the processes that you have, let alone to understand what they really do, how you can optimize them, what the dependencies are between your different processes. And if you have things that you need to manage, what you’re looking to manage is your business outcomes, you’re probably trying to optimize for certain metrics. So what we want you to be able to do is give instructions to your workforce about the outcomes that you’re looking for, and not really have to worry about which process is going to run on which machine and in which order.”
Process mining
He also announced more investment in process mining and the data driven organization. “Data is waiting to be leveraged and put into other applications, workflows and delivering insights. And you also have a digital workforce, which itself is producing data. We want people to be able to collapse that time between obtaining or creating data and then acting on it. So the time between analysis and action is going to collapse down to its lowest level yet. And we want to endow the digital workforce with ever greater intelligence to be able to act in different scenarios and different ways with different systems. We want the digital workforce to be an intelligent counterpart to your human workforce. Not just to do work, but to actually inform, augment and assist human workers.”
