Frequently asked questions
SS&C | Blue Prism® Process Intelligence Powered by ABBYY Timeline is an OEM product which fully integrates Process and Task Mining into the Blue Prism platform.
- Accelerate time to insight – Improved analytic productivity by industrializing process and task discovery and analysis across the enterprise. Typically, this will speed discovery efforts from months or weeks to days saving 80% time and effort.
- Speed to automation – Improved developer productivity by automatically generating process definition documents (PDDs) and automation skeletons from task level data saving 30% on build time.
- Optimize Peak Performance – 360-degree visibility, monitor automations for problem detection, response automation, predict bottlenecks, and prove ROI.
- Easy to get started – Options for cloud or on-premise deployment.
- Discover – Enables users to create digital twins of end-to-end processes as well as end user tasks to discover, analyze, and identify where process improvement is possible through behavioral changes or improvement with automation.
- Design – These digital twins can then be exported as a JSON file into Blue Prism Capture for further refinement, generation of digital PDDs and can then be used to build digital worker skeletons in Studio. Alternatively, customers can use ALM to further apply best-practices and wireframes before importing into Studio.
- Deliver – The offering continues to monitor end-to-end processes in flight across digital workers automations and other systems, providing alerts if any process deviates from what is expected, or triggering digital workers to improve the process.
Process intelligence combines Process and Task Mining in a single platform. Individually, Process Mining captures system event logs (a macro view of a process) and Task Mining captures user events on desktops (a micro view of the related tasks). Together, they comprise a much more realistic view of business activities.
Process Intelligence provides integration with the entire SS&C Blue Prism® intelligent automation suite, as well as the SS&C Blue Prism® Chorus solutions. These integrations allow you to leverage the outputs of Process Intelligence into the SS&C Blue Prism® RPA and BPM solutions automatically, and thus reducing the time to develop automations and map and manage processes. The technical solution includes Process Mining capabilities deployed on servers on-premises or on the cloud. Task Mining capabilities require a server-based Enterprise Recording Service and a desktop client. Capture 2.1 or later is required for the JSON integration.
The offering is available in two configurations, with no fee differences between the two:
- On-premises (either on-prem at customer or on customer’s AWS or Azure instance)
- SaaS hosted by ABBYY on behalf of SS&C Blue Prism
All the infrastructure sizing for servers for the centralized Process Intelligence engine for analytics and Process Mining, and the Recording service are specified in System requirements and prerequisites for Windows and Linux systems.
The Recorder can be installed on local machines or using standard IT Windows client installation distribution tools. The Recorder, Recording Service and Process Intelligence installation guides are available here.
Process Mining uses system logs to analyze processes and provide opportunities and does not require any installation or component on a user's computer. To analyze tasks, Process Intelligence can employ Task Mining which uses data recorded by the Recorder installed on a user's computer in real time as users interact with their computers. The users do not need to take any action other than to turn the recorder on or off (or that permission can be set by a central administrator). Logs created by the Recorder are structured in a certain way and include recorded user actions and their associated screenshots. These logs are aggregated by a Recording Service which is then sent to the centralized Process Intelligence engine for further analysis.
A Recorder is installed on a user's machine and in the background will record user actions as they perform business tasks. There is no performance degradation to the system so the user is not affected. A user can disable the Recorder if they are working on something not related to the task, and this permission can also be managed at the Administrator level. Also, defined templates can be applied to the user's recorder in the Task Mining Recording service. These templates are configured to either include or exclude applications for recording. Transformations can also be configured which will find and replace text in logs in order to redact sensitive information, such as email addresses or IDs. This option complements the Obfuscate user data feature when recording screenshots.
No, if you have already signed the standard Blue Prism EULA, then no additional T&Cs are required. However, the EULA terms apply to your use of Process Intelligence as a separate product from Blue Prism Enterprise.
Yes, an additional click-wrap TOU addendum is required.
Process Intelligence has a unique patent-pending time-based architecture that captures every event on every process instance, providing a much more granular set of analytic capabilities out of the box with no coding necessary. It can effectively discover and analyze highly variable case-based processes as well as more standardized processes such as Order to Cash and Procure to Pay.
Blue Prism Process Intelligence powered by ABBYY Timeline provides the advantage of a unified integration, support and licensing offer on Blue Prism paper. However, Blue Prism maintains a choice strategy for our customers to use their preferred Process Mining vendor, or combination of vendors to best meet their needs.
We are happy to continue serving customers who have separately purchased ABBYY Timeline and Blue Prism. These customers will be able to access the technical product integrations between ABBYY Timeline and Blue Prism Capture 2.1 or later, however support and legal terms will be separate.
Customers can later decide to buy the unified Blue Prism Process Intelligence offer from Blue Prism if they choose to get single point of support and the on-going integrated roadmap.
System logs from virtually any system can be analyzed within Blue Prism Process Intelligence. The minimum data requirements for a Process Mining event log are specified in Process analysis project data requirements. Additional attributes about the data can be provided. The SaaS version includes a built-in ETL tool for data collection and conditioning. Furthermore, there are back-end API Data connectors for popular systems, such as SAP, Salesforce, and ServiceNow, as outlined in Data management.
If 'offline' refers to user actions that happen on a user's desktop instead of being recorded in a system log, that is where the Task Recorder and Recording Service for Task Mining can be used.
Yes, in a contact center process flows can be mined and analyzed across pre-call, during call and after call work using a unique Call ID from the IVR and ACD system logs and other systems such as CRM or Chatbots. Then the individual task steps between the system events can be captured and analyzed using Task Mining. Together this data could be analyzed and automation opportunities for unattended and attended automation can be pinpointed.
Any process can be analyzed at the system log level (Process Mining) or user level (Task Mining) even if the process has not yet been fully standardized. The Blue Prism Process Intelligence solution powered by ABBYY Timeline can be used to capture any process where there is some basis for structured logs (in the case of Process Mining) to help you analyze variations, patterns and find automation target. Task Mining allows you to record user interactions (button clicks, screens, user actions) that could be part of a non-standard user procedure and would be typically in the domain of unstructured data, but that can then be analyzed for patterns and automation opportunities and details.
From a process project, you can define a node that represents a task, and then you can zoom from the process project to a filtered task project and see all the ways that the task represented in the process project is actually done in the filtered task project.
The Process Intelligence and Capture solutions do not directly have an integration with repository tools such as GitHub. However, Blue Prism could be used to set up custom automations via Blue Prism digital workers.
Yes, when importing from Process Intelligence into Capture you have the option then to move the output from Capture into Automation Lifecycle Management to apply best practices and recommended wireframe templates before moving into Studio.
No, the Process Intelligence Task Recorder works together with Capture. The Process Intelligence Task Recorders allows many users desktops to be recorded, then analyzed for patterns to identify the optimal process for automation. A JSON file that represents the aggregated best version of the tasks can be exported from Process Intelligence directly into Capture. Then Capture can be used for generating digital PDDs, further refining branches, and also generating .BPRELEASE files for import into Blue Prism Studio. Capture also has a task recorder capability but is focused on single user's desktop, and it does not have the ability to aggregate many users tasks into a recording service nor to analyze patterns as Process Intelligence has. For more details, see Integration with Blue Prism Capture and Studio.
There are typically four roles which are importantly to reach success and scale:
- Automation Center of Excellence CoE leader
- Process Improvement owner in charge of process excellence and transformation
- Process Owners who are the functionality subject matter experts with process understanding
- Data resource(s) typically from IT that can provide access to system data and logs
All Process Intelligence training courses are available on the Blue Prism University.