The purpose of this foundation is to provide your RPA team with the steps to effectively deploy, support and manage your operational processes. Working with the development team and the business to ensure that the digital workforce is integrated with their human co-workers. Here we provide guidance on how to define the management, reporting, scheduling and referral handling processes for business as usual (BAU).
Once processes are deployed, the digital workforce operates as instructed with oversight being provided by the Process Controllers. The Process Controllers should have a defined communication channel and associated Service Level Agreements in place with the relevant support functions to provide maximum processing time availability and straight-through processing rates.
We provide more detail on the key elements of the Service Foundation:
Who is responsible?
System/Infrastructure Support: All underlying application issues are managed and resolved by IT. Even if they are ultimately resolved by third party providers. Normally a ticket is raised according to existing organisational standards within their ITSM tool and handled by the appropriate application support team.
Product Support: Blue Prism technical product issues are raised to and resolved by the Blue Prism Customer Support service.
Process Support: Process automation issues are handled and resolved by the RPA team. They are normally identified by Process Controllers and passed on to Developers where necessary. Below is a breakdown of some of the specific support areas an RPA capability should consider:
The RPA team is responsible for testing and promoting new automations into production.
Operational (BAU) resources handle process scenarios which are out of scope of the automation. These are often referred to as Business Exceptions. There will be certain scenarios identified which require the digital workforce to hand off to a human.
This should be a deliberate and controlled hand-off process that provides the operational resource with the relevant information to pick up the case from the digital workforce. Once the case has been investigated it can either be completed by the human referral team or passed back to the digital workforce.
It is important to note that hand-offs are ideally automated. For example, flagged to a human operator via email or a workflow tool. This minimises the impact on the Control Room team.
Developers handle unexpected scenarios where the solution doesn't perform as designed. These are often referred to as System Exceptions. Exceptions may also happen when the digital workforce encounters something that hasn't yet been defined in the process documentation.
If the digital workforce encounters a lot of exceptions over a short timeframe they can be configured to stop.
If you have a large deployment you will often find it is the digital workforce that serve as an early warning should there be any unanticipated issues in production applications. Whatever the root cause of an exception it's important that the Process Controllers understand Blue Prism. This will allow them to determine the correct way to channel the exception.
Process Controllers manage the workload and demand for the Digital Workforce. Within business operations, Process Controllers will be responsible for scheduling and managing the demand for the digital workforce. The Process Controllers will decide which processes are going to be deployed at any given time and how much work is prioritised across the digital workforce.
Failover, resilience and disaster recovery is provided via infrastructure teams. Another key component is the provision of business continuity. This means providing recovery and back-up if either the primary data centre or any given application goes down.